


In Which Eddie Brock Wishes He Had Never Seen All The Movies In The Alien Franchise

by Katjatier



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Body Horror, Crack, Eddie continuing to be hapless, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Misunderstandings, Mpreg, Multi, Rough Sex, Tentacle Sex, is that a tag, just a lot to unpack in this fic, mentions of gore, mild violence, non-pet small animal death, some gore, sympreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2019-08-20 04:39:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 40,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16549070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katjatier/pseuds/Katjatier
Summary: HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY





	1. Chapter 1

 

**1.**

 

It’s late at night, Eddie is in bed and slightly drunk, and Venom’s tongue is halfway down his throat.

Not that that’s a bad thing. It is, when Eddie is in this state, a very good thing. Eddie thinks about it during the day sometimes, thinks of the tongue pressing down into him like this, Venom’s face close to his own with his tongue drooling slime and scraping him up with the barbs at its base, and it makes him want to _shudder_ like he’s disgusted. But as soon as they’re alone in his bed Eddie just wants it again, wants Venom to fuck his mouth just like he is doing right now. Wants him to wrap long slimy parts of himself around Eddie’s cock, wants him to pin him down and push other parts up inside of him, until Eddie is sweating into the sheets and trying and failing to get enough air, until he can barely _stand_ it…

Eddie groans, opens his mouth to allow the wet tongue to work in deeper. It arches up slightly, so that the rough surface rasps across the roof of his mouth, and Eddie twitches violently enough for the whole bed to thud against the wall. He keeps his mouth open though, straining his jaw to accept as much as Venom will give him. There’s just enough room like this for Eddie to breathe through his nose, but he can’t breathe _well_ —his vision is starting to go fuzzy around the edges, and everything is turning gray, fading into itself: the dim walls of the apartment around them, the mattress underneath, the tentacles holding down Eddie’s wrists and ankles and thighs, the sliding, pulsing movements of the tentacles around and over and inside his lower half. The single thick tentacle pushing against his insides—Eddie has been trying to push back against that one, but the other tentacles wrapped around him won’t let him shift his hips, won’t let him move his legs to get leverage.

 _Good_ , Venom says in his head, and Eddie whimpers as the tentacle in his ass pushes deeper, as the tendrils around his cock constrict and pulsate and dig in. He feels exposed, inside and out, like all the skin’s been stripped off him. It makes him shudder. It makes him want to hide his face in the sheets. It makes his dick harder.

 _Do you want to come_ , Venom says.

“Mfffmm,” Eddie says around the thick length of muscle in his mouth, and does his best to nod.

In front of him, Venom’s head tilts questioningly, as if he can’t understand what Eddie means. Eddie looks up at him, his hands clenching a little where they’re pinned against the scuffed-up bedsheets. He might not be at his mental best right now, but he has known Venom long enough to know what is going on here. The symbiote is fucking with him.

Well, Venom is not the only one who can do that. Eddie glares at him for a moment longer, and then bites down hard on Venom’s tongue.

It doesn’t hurt him, of course, but Venom growls, the sound loud and threatening within the walls of the small apartment. There’s a weird suctioning noise as the tongue pulls its way out of Eddie’s mouth. The other tentacles stop their steady movement.

Eddie gasps, sucking in air, and then immediately chokes on the slime Venom had left behind in his mouth. He tries to smile up at him through the coughing fit regardless. His mouth is wet, sore, swollen.

“Say sorry, Eddie,” Venom says, out loud this time.

Eddie is still coughing, and doesn’t have it in him to speak, but he shakes his head.

Venom growls again, and then the tongue is sliding around Eddie's neck. He closes his eyes. Claws must have materialized from somewhere, because now there's something sharp digging into the skin on his upper arms, a warning that’s already harsh enough to bruise.

He smiles again and swallows, clearing his throat of the slime Venom had left there. It’s glorious, pissing Venom off like this, and Eddie tries to move his hips up into the tentacle still wrapped around his dick, but of course Venom won’t let him.

 _Say sorry, Eddie,_ Venom says, in his head again now, but the symbiote still manages to make it ridiculously loud _._

Eddie hums, his eyes still closed, ignoring him. He waits until Venom's claws have dug in a bit more, almost piercing the skin on his biceps, waits until the tongue is pressing tight enough around his neck for the world to start to fade and shift again. Then he mumbles: “Sorry.”

_You don’t mean it._

The tongue twitches tighter around his neck. Eddie is wet everywhere; he can feel warm drool dripping into the hollow of his throat. He opens his eyes again. Venom’s face is so close to his.

“I mean it,” he croaks, and he does. He’s had his fun. “Sorry, Venom. Sorry.”

A little ripple of satisfaction goes through Eddie then—he is still getting used to being able to feel the things the symbiote feels, especially when he is the cause of them—and then the claws ease off his arms, and the tentacles on his cock and inside his ass resume their perfect motion.

“Mmmm,” Eddie says.

 _You_ are _sorry, Eddie,_ says the voice in his head _. You will do anything for me._

“Oh yeah,” Eddie says, and means it. He’s being fucked hard enough now for the mattress to creak. He wants to come like this. He wants them _together_. “Anything—anything—“

 _Anything?_ The tip of the tongue is pushing wet behind his ear.

“ _Yes._ God. Fuck.”

It happens immediately.

He’s hit, suddenly, by a fucking _car crash_ of symbiote emotion, so strong that it pulls him away from the rising tension of his orgasm. It’s not the usual vague feelings of pleasure and satisfaction that he gets from Venom when they do this: this is different; this is strong, adoring, possessive, _fierce_. Venom might as well be trying to drown him in cartoon lovehearts. Eddie feels warm, all through him, as strong and interconnected as if they’re sharing a nervous system.

The tongue is gone from his neck while Eddie is thinking, and then it’s back in his mouth, pushing in hard and sudden, working deep. All he can see is Venom’s face, those eyes looking directly into his, and what he can _feel_ —

 _Oh god_ , he wants to say, _oh god_.

The distraction from his orgasm is gone, but the feeling isn’t: it all just circles back to his dick, to the pleasure in his insides and in his throat, stabs in deep along his nerves, so good, so perfect, warm, _warm_. Eddie wails around the tongue in his throat, jerks under the tentacles holding him, comes hard all over his own sweaty stomach.

The feeling doesn’t let up, even once Venom has withdrawn his tongue and the ceiling above him has come back into focus, even once Eddie’s cock has softened and the cum is cooling on his damp skin. Eddie just lies there, basking in it, letting Venom stroke and kiss him, letting whatever it is the symbiote is feeling play back and forth between them.

Maybe he should suspect something is up then, but then again, he’s kind of distracted, and it’s not like it's the first weird thing that’s happened to him this month.

 

**2.**

 

He wakes up early the next morning, covered in the unpleasant tacky sensation he always gets when he neglects to shower after sex. The bed smells… not great, and one of the sheets has a tear in it right near Eddie’s shoulder.

“That’s your fault,” he mumbles.

No answer. Venom is still out of sight.

Eddie rolls over to face the direction of the bathroom, which he decides counts as the first step to actually getting there. He can still feel the bruises on his wrists, and there’s a raw ache deep inside him when he moves. A slight metallic taste in his mouth, as well, where the barbs on Venom’s tongue had scraped him. None of it is particularly painful, but it’s unusual—usually Venom heals all of that stuff right after sex.

Well, maybe he’d forgotten. Eddie twitches his fingers against the bedsheets, expecting Venom to send out a bit of welcoming goo to wrap around his hand like he usually does in the morning.

Nothing happens.

“Hey, you,” Eddie says. “Do you want to eat?”

No answer.

“You okay in there?” He frowns, feeling something heavy in his stomach that for once is nervousness and _not_ the presence of an alien symbiote, and then finally, he hears the voice.

 _Tired_ , Venom says.

Eddie shrugs, sitting up and not hiding his relieved smile. “I didn’t know you could get tired. You need a nap or something?”

 _Tired_ , Venom says again, sounding annoyed.

He shrugs again. “Okay. Whatever.”

He stands up—that hurts too, a little; he really has become too accustomed to Venom fixing him right after—and heads to the bathroom. Might be nice to get some peace and quiet for once, anyway.

He showers, bracing one arm against the wall to ward off the last of his drowsiness. There’s still marks visible on his arms and wrists from last night, which is also unusual, but honestly—well, it’s not that Eddie is into Venom leaving this many bruises on him, but he’s not _not_ into it. Eddie is just gentle when he towels himself down, and it’s all good.

It’s also good to be able to watch TV without fighting over the channels, and to actually get as much work as he wants done without getting constantly distracted by an alien asking questions about every tiny thing. He still ends up eating a huge breakfast, and then two versions of lunch, and then an extra dinner, but clearly symbiotes still need a lot of energy even while they’re resting.

“How long do you guys nap for, anyway,” he asks at about nine pm, while he’s standing in front of the open fridge door in his pajamas looking for an after-dinner snack.

No answer. He can hear nothing but the sound of the almost-muted tv across the room, and of his downstairs neighbor calling for her cat again.

Eddie shrugs and grabs a plate of leftovers that had managed to escape his notice for almost twenty-four hours. He’s happy back on the couch with his meal for a good half an hour before things start going wrong.

 

**3.**

 

He’s already opening the apartment’s front door before he realizes what he is doing.

Eddie gets like this, sometimes, when he’s hungry: he ends up standing in front of the fridge or one of the cabinets in the kitchen, looking for something to eat without realizing it.

But not the _doorway to his apartment_. The door's open in front of him: he can see out into the short hallway. Anyone coming home would be able to see him here, half-awake, in his pajamas and looking like he had ordered an entire catalog of drugs and then taken all of them.

He glances back at the couch. The plate he’d been eating off is on the floor now, empty, and there’s a pillow lying at one end of the couch, a blanket that looks disheveled—had he fallen asleep? Had he gotten this far before waking up? That hasn’t happened before.

“Venom,” he mumbles. “Why are we here.”

No answer, but he knows already, somehow. Eddie is hungry, but not for anything in the fridge or the kitchen. No, there’s stuff in the apartment across the hall that he can eat instead, stuff that Eddie can get if he wants to. Muscles, bones, maybe a bit of—

Wait. Muscles? Bones?

_Bones?_

“What is this shit, Venom?”

No answer.

The hallway is quiet, so Eddie risks sticking his head out and looking around. The stairs are as empty as you'd expect them to be at this hour. No weird sounds or smells—nothing weirder than usual in this building, anyway. Nothing that might have brought him out here and given him thoughts like those.

“We talked about this,” he whispers angrily, and steps back and very firmly closes the door with a loud click. “We don’t eat our neighbors, Venom. We don't…”

He can’t finish.

He’s _hungry_ , a wave of new, unfocused hunger that seizes his stomach like a cramp. He groans and stoops forward, presses one hand against his abdomen as if touching it will help; the other hand moves, of its own accord, back toward the door handle. Eddie forces it back down next to his side instead.

“ _No_ ,” he hisses, and takes a step away from the door and toward the kitchen instead. It’s ok. He’s been hungry before, even if it's never been like _this_ , and he still has food, even if he’s out of leftovers. Venom will tell him what he needs to eat. Even if Venom is still—napping, or whatever he’s doing—the symbiote will tell him. He always does. Eddie will know what to do. He’ll just go over here and eat the kitchen, he’ll just…

Wait. The kitchen?

“The kitchen?” he says out loud, and that's when Venom finally decides to answer.

 _Eat the walls,_ he says _._

“I’m not eating the fucking walls,” Eddie says.

No answer.

Eddie takes a breath, which is difficult when his stomach feels like it's trying to digest itself. Tries to speak calmly like he always does when he has to be firm with his symbiote. “Are you talking in your sleep or something? You’re being weird. I think you should wake up now, Venom.”

Nothing.

“Venom. Listen. I think you need to—”

_HUNGRY HUNGRY HUNGRY_

Eddie jumps, stumbling back and falling heavily onto his ass next to the door.

 _HUNGRY_  

_HUNGRY_

**_HUNGRY_ **

_I can make it to the fridge_ , he thinks, and he gets there mostly on his feet, even though his stomach still hurts and it feels like every cell in his body is suddenly screaming at him as loud as his asshole symbiote is. Venom will tell him something more sensible to eat when he's there. Venom will tell him, and it will make sense.

He yanks open the fridge door, grabs the egg carton on the second shelf. It’s a big 18 pack, missing only the four eggs that Eddie had put in an omelette that morning. Eddie opens the cardboard lid as he sits down on the tiles in front of the still-open fridge, cold air on his face and the cold tiles under his ass, and it’s ok, Venom will—

Eddie picks up one of the eggs. It’s like a movement entirely from memory, automatic, like riding a bike, except that no, he has _definitely_ never shoved an entire raw egg into his mouth before.

He bites down on it. The broken pieces of shell scrape on his already scraped-up mouth as he chews, and it hurts going down his throat, but it’s okay. _Better_ than okay. The yelling has shut up now, and this is not exactly what he had expected Venom to direct him toward, but does that really matter when eggs are so damn delicious?

He picks up another one of the little tasty bastards, and then another. The second egg goes in too fast, and pieces of the shell slip out of his mouth as he crunches it between his teeth. Eddie picks up the eggshell pieces from the floor, pushes them back into his mouth.

‘Oh god,” he mumbles. “Oh god that’s so good, thank you thank you.”

He eats another, and another. It is blissful. The awful, cramping feeling in his stomach has already faded to something dull enough for him to almost ignore.

“Thank you, chickens,” he says. He pulls the last egg out of the carton and bites into it. His fingers are covered in sticky egg white, and he licks them off now, sucking the last of the goop from under his fingernails. “Thank you. Oh god, that’s so good. That’s so good.”

 _Good,_ Venom agrees _. Now eat the kitchen._

Eddie looks up sharply, wiping spit off his fingers onto his t-shirt. “I’m not eating the kitchen,” he hisses.

_Eat the kitchen._

He looks up at the countertop, just resting there on top of the cabinet next to the fridge. It actually _does_ look pretty good, and it's not like Eddie actually needs a countertop for anything. He can just eat like this on the floor.

Still, though. “I can’t eat that," he says. "It’s too hard. I’ll—I’ll break my teeth.”

_Eat your teeth._

“Venom, for god’s sake.” Eddie’s hand shoots up to cover his mouth, as if he can protect what's inside it that way. “Wait. How the fuck would I even _do_ that?”

 _Teeth_ , Venom says.

“Shut _up_.”

_Teeth teeth teeth teeth **teeth TEETH**_

“ _Enough_.” Eddie says. “This has gone on far enough. You ignored me all day, and now you’re just being _really_ fucking weird. What the hell is going on?”

A pause, and he waits, thinks Venom is going to explain. His symbiote is a lot of things, yes, but _indirect_  has never been one of them.

But he just sits there waiting for a while in the light of the open fridge door, and then Venom just says:

 _Tired_.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**4.**

 

Eddie’s mouth hurts too much to eat the next day, but he eats anyway.

 

**5.**

 

His downstairs neighbor Edith is at work on the late shift, so it’s okay that Eddie sneaks down the stairs shortly after midnight and then breaks into her apartment. He’d been inside once before, a while back: she'd invited him in after he’d returned her cat when it had gotten out and ended up lost outside. He remembers from that visit that that the main room has a sign on the wall saying “Life’s a Beach!” and that underneath the sign is a little end table with a big bowl of seashells on it.

He has been thinking about that bowl of seashells all day.

He eats them now, and the cat watches from where it’s sitting on the arm of the couch, looking at him like it’s judging.

Eddie doesn’t blame it, really. Eating these fuckers _hurts_ —they are the big, fancy type of shell, not the little ones you find everywhere on the beach, and several of them have sharp pointy bits even _before_ he crunches them in his mouth. He keeps letting out little moaning noises from the pain as he pushes more shells past his lips, and his mouth feels and tastes like it did that one time when a very large interviewee had jumped across a table and punched him.

It’s not enough to stop him, though. The feeling of the little pieces going into his stomach, inside him—it’s like drinking water in the desert. Even the crunching noises are good, somehow.Even the pain almost feels good, knowing what it will lead to.

Eddie lowers his chin down to prepare to stuff in another big shell, and a little trickle of blood falls out of his mouth. He looks down, the large brown-and-white dappled shell still in his hand. Man, he is going to have to clean up  _so much,_ he thinks _._

Nearby, the cat starts to purr.

 _More_ , Venom says in his head. It’s the first word he spoken since Eddie broke in here.

He pauses. Most of the urgency that brought him into this apartment has gone now, although the shell still does look fucking delicious. Eddie can almost feel his heartbeat lowering, feel the sucking empty feeling in his stomach fading back to a normal, human level of hunger.

Eddie looks around the room, then back down, and says: “I’m bleeding all over this nice lady’s apartment.”

_She is not nice. She does not mind her business._

Eddie’s mind flips back to the memory Venom is referencing. Yes, there _had_ been an embarrassing incident when Edith had called 911 because she’d heard Eddie yelling upstairs and had thought that he was being murdered. Eddie had answered the door half-naked, and then had spent several long minutes explaining away the noises she'd heard and the bruises on his neck and chest, all the while frantically willing Venom to stay out of sight.

“She was just worried about me,” he tells Venom now. The words come out a little slurred, what with the swelling in his mouth. “She was being a good neighbor.”

_Eat the shell, Eddie._

It looks so good, and he pushes it into his mouth and bites down, wincing as he swallows. “Will you let me clean up the room after, and not complain about it?”

 _Yes_.

Eddie wipes a smear of blood off his mouth. “Thank you. See, we’re _cooperating_ now. We compromised. It’s not that hard, is it?” He takes another small bite, swallows. “And now we’ve done that, we can move on to you telling me _what exactly is_ —”

_Eat the cat._

He coughs, almost chokes on the shell. “I’m not eating the—Venom, we _talked_ about this, we don’t eat people’s pets, we don’t—”

_Coward._

"I'm not a—"

_Human coward._

“That’s it.” Eddie picks up the bowl that had once held the seashells, makes a token effort to shove the few remaining shells and broken pieces back inside. Maybe he can make it look like the cat had carried the shells off and hid them somewhere. Maybe Edith won't know that he was here and won't be upset. “We’re leaving,” he announces. “We are not coming back here. And we’re _not_ eating pets.”

Venom doesn’t answer, and Eddie collects the rest of the pieces, using the edge of his sweatshirt sleeve to wipe up the blood he’d drooled over the floor. He senses anger in Venom’s silence, but it’s not the symbiote’s _usual_ anger, which is more akin to silent sulking. There’s an edge to it now that Eddie can’t identify: something stronger and pressing and _there,_ like an object just outside his field of vision.

He pauses in his cleanup, slipping his hand back out of his sleeve now that he's done wiping. It’s unusual for them, Eddie not knowing something like this. Venom is not exactly the most complex being in the universe when it comes to feelings, and he doesn’t usually keep secrets.

Eddie straightens up, swallows the nervousness in his chest. It hurts. He feels torn up all the way down to his stomach. He probably _is_ torn up all the way down to his stomach. “You—want to talk about it?”

Silence, and Eddie shakes his head and stands up. God, Edith is _never_ going to believe that the cat hid all of these shells. This was just a stupid idea from the beginning. He says: “Are you _ever_ going to tell me what’s going on?”

More silence. Eddie sets the nearly-empty bowl back down on the end table. “V, I don’t wanna do this, but if you’re going to keep this up then I really need to talk to someone. I’ll call Anne and tell her you’re alive, and—”

A violent push from inside him, and Eddie falls back, onto his ass. It’s not a particularly hard fall, but one arm clips the bowl-that-formerly-contained-shells on his way down and it falls too, shattering on the floor beside him. But he hardly hears that, because all he can hear in his head is

 

_**NO**. _

 

“V—” Eddie tries to pull himself up, ends up pulled down on his back on the floor.

 _NO,_ he says again, loud in his head. _Too dangerous._

The cat has jumped down from the sofa arm, and is eyeing them silently from its new position closer on the floor. Eddie hopes it doesn’t come close enough for Venom to try anything. “See,” he says weakly. “See, now you’re just confusing me more.”

 _You said_ anything, Venom says.

Eddie frowns. It takes him a second to figure out what Venom even talking about. “I said—I—Venom, that was just a sex thing.”

_You said it, Eddie._

Eddie tries to pull himself up again, but finds he can’t do much but raise his head an inch or two off the floor and then thunk it down again. “That isn’t fair. I didn’t mean you had permission to use me as a puppet.”

_Not as a puppet._

Eddie frowns. “What then?”

Silence. The cat is purring again.

Eddie’s voice comes out soft when he asks: “Venom, _what?”_

More silence.

But that unidentifiable feeling is still there, mixed in with the symbiote’s anger, pulsing and growing in the lower parts of Eddie’s brain, and now it grows, moves closer and grows stronger like Venom is trying to show him, and Eddie finally starts to realize what it is.

Protectiveness.

And it’s not protectiveness aimed at _him_.

“Shit,” Eddie says, over the sound of the cat’s purring.

_Eddie._

_“_ Shit. Shit. Shit. _Shit_.”

 _Eddie_.

The symbiote is letting him move now at least, and Eddie pulls himself up, stumbles half-standing across the wooden floor, even though he knows already that there’s nowhere he can go. He can’t escape this by running. It’s inside him. Literally.

He ends up next to the couch, and the cat sees him coming and skitters away into the corner of the room, exiting the situation in a way that Eddie is suddenly extremely jealous of.

“Is this—” he stops, rests his head meekly against the rough fabric of the couch behind him. His voice sounds so small. “—is this because I let you fuck me like that?”

Venom doesn’t say anything for a moment, but Eddie is hit with a strong echo of the feeling that the symbiote always gets when Eddie has said something unusually and uniqely stupid. _No, Eddie_. _Doesn’t work that way_.

He feels heat rushing to his face, wetness in his eyes. Presses his hands into fists against the smooth floor. He wants to ask more, he has so many pressing questions, _so many,_ but the words won’t come to his mouth—would not come to his mouth, probably, even if his mouth was uninjured.

He can’t handle this. He can’t. He _can’t_.

In the corner, the cat has started licking its own butt. It still seems like an improvement on Eddie's situation.

“Did you—” he manages finally, “did you do this to me on _purpose_? Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we were a team, V! We had boundaries. I thought—” His voice breaks. He wipes more blood off his mouth. “Does this mean all of this is going to get worse?” He gestures at remains of the bowl, the shell pieces.

 _Yes,_ Venom says _._

“No,” Eddie says. He shakes his head. “No, V. Get out of me, and take it somewhere else.” He knows it’s not really, possible, knows it somehow even before he says it, but he says it anyway.

_You said anything, Eddie._

“People say all kind of dumb things during sex, you fucking puddle of bin water! Now _get out_.”

Venom doesn’t, of course. Instead Eddie feels something around his shoulders, a tingling sensation as Venom pushes outward through his skin and his sweatshirt, and then warm, firm movement. A tentacle is wrapping around him, like a hug.

Eddie shrugs it off, annoyed, but another black hug-tentacle appears, and then another, sliding tighter around him, around his shoulders, his ribs. Another nuzzles at the side of his face, scratching over the stubble.

“I told you to fuck off,” Eddie says, but his voice is weak, wet from the crying he is pretending he’s not doing.

 _You said that, Eddie. It meant that we were compatible._ Venom pauses. _I did not intend for it to happen this quickly._

“I don’t care. I don't care if you meant to or not. You still gotta get out,” he says, but it’s even weaker now. The tentacles keep up their hug-pressure, and the protective feeling is humming so strong inside him now, even if Eddie is not technically feeling it himself, even if he has no _desire_ to.

Maybe part of that feeling is actually aimed at Eddie, after all.

He closes his eyes tight, which causes a tear to drip out, but he’s way too exhausted right now to even be embarrassed about that. He is getting hungry again, just in the time it took to have this stupid conversation. “Okay, okay,” he mumbles. “Okay. But I’m still telling Annie. You can't stop me doing that.”

There’s a strong flash of contention inside him, but this time Eddie ignores it. If Venom is going to get Eddie into this, he can fucking learn to put up with it. Accident or not. In any case, Venom doesn't push it. Maybe having this talk had calmed the symbiote somewhat, even if it had done the opposite to Eddie.

He sits for a while. After several minutes of undignified sniffling, he manages to pull himself to his feet off the floor, steadying himself on the arm of the sofa. His brain feels fried, numb. He feels like he wants to keep it that way forever. Venom is still wrapped around him, and Eddie can't muster up the pride to tell him to stop. It feels too good right now.

He finds paper on the kitchen counter near the door, decorated with pictures of little purple flowers around the border. He writes a note, wiping his hand on the leg of his jeans first in case there’s still any blood on it:

 

Dear Edith,

I broke into your apartment by accident because I thought it was my apartment and then I broke the bowl on the table too. I am so sorry :(

Please send me an invoice!!! The cat is okay. Love, Eddie.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the comments! I haven't been able to answer many of them because life is hell, but I do read and appreciate each and every comment so much <3

 

**6.**

 

_What are you doing, Eddie._

“Isn’t it obvious?” The phone at his ear goes to voicemail, and he hears Anne’s voice for the fourth time in an hour, telling him to leave a message. This time, Eddie hangs up without bothering to follow her instructions. He’s already left three.

Well, he shouldn’t be surprised. She’s probably got her phone on silent at night, and even if she didn’t, she might just be ignoring him. She's a busy woman. Sleep is more important than an ex-boyfriend.

He gets it. Anne doesn’t owe him more than that, owes him considerably _less_ , in fact. But knowing that doesn’t help his stupid, stupid situation.

Eddie steadies himself against the kitchen counter, which he has still managed to avoid eating, despite the fact that his hunger has been increasing ever since he re-entered the apartment. His heart has started to beat too heavily in his chest, too. He feels hot all over, like he's wearing a thick coat instead of pajama pants and a t-shirt.

It’s getting worse, and he doesn’t know what to do. Anne is the only one who _knows_.

And below all the hunger and the thumping in his chest, that feeling from the symbiote is there as well: protectiveness, mixed now with low anger. It still doesn’t like him talking to her.

Eddie tosses the phone back on the counter, and switches to focusing on that feeling instead, because it’s marginally less awful than anything else. “Why are you so mad about me talking to her, anyway? You _like_ Annie.”

 _Not now,_ Venom says _. Not for this._

“That’s bullshit, V.”

 _She will tell her friend,_ he says. _I do not like her friend._

“Dan?” He rests more weight against the counter: being upright is taking more and more effort. “What’s wrong with him?”

In response, that protective feeling swells up, mixed in now with a rush of sudden pain that makes him gasp. A memory. Venom is sharing a memory.

Damn. And Eddie had thought the MRI had been unpleasant for _him_.

“You think Dan will—” Eddie trails off, wipes his face with one hand. He’s sweating, and it’s not just due to the panic. Something else is happening. His heartbeat is so loud.

He shakes his head. He wants to argue, reassure the symbiote that Dan won’t deliberately hurt Venom, that he won’t hurt the—the thing that Eddie still isn’t thinking about. But right now he can’t work up the energy, not when the idea of this whole situation disappearing actually fills him more with comfort than fear. He wants so bad for it all to go away.

He wants, at least, for Venom to comfort him again. But Venom is apparently _tired_  again, and nothing comes of Eddie’s desire.

So he just straightens up, makes his way over to the wall next to the television, kneels down on the cold floor, and starts sucking on the exposed bricks. It seems like the sensible thing to do.

It tastes astoundingly good, and after a minute or two, something starts to flow out to cover his right arm: Venom encloses his hand, forms it into a shiny black fist, and then punches the wall. There’s a cloud of dust, and the gentle sound of brick pieces sprinkling onto the floor. The gooey hand retracts back inside him.

“Thank you,” Eddie says, once he’s stopped coughing. A little bit of help is better than none, he supposes.

He gets down on all fours and starts picking up the little chunks from the floor, pushing them into his sore, bloodied mouth. Starts with the larger ones: it’s hard to swallow now, with all the swelling, but he manages. Then the smaller ones, and finally he reaches up to the new jagged crater in the wall and works off more little pieces from its edges with his fingertips.

He leans back against the wall next to the crater; the bricks are cool, refreshing, stable behind his back. He is still too hot, but he doesn’t want to sit up enough to take his t-shirt off, so he just hikes the shirt up, exposing enough of his stomach to benefit from more cool air. The heavy thudding in his chest has calmed a little, and he closes his eyes.

He must pass out like that for a while, because the sun’s already up when someone knocks on the door.

 

**7.**

 

“It’s back, isn’t it,” Anne says through the crack in the front door.

She’s fully dressed, makeup on and put-together like she’s on her way to work. She must have called beforehand, but Eddie had left the phone on the kitchen counter and had probably slept through the ringtone. He feels like he’s been asleep for a week, but somehow he is still exhausted. He’s achey all over. There's a particularly sharp pain under his ribcage on the right, too, like he’d been sleeping on his side weird.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Eddie says weakly, leaning his head against the door frame. He is so hungry, too. He is more hungry than it seems possible to be after the couple of hours that he slept.

“Can I come in?” Anne says. She pushes at the door, but the chain is still latched, and the door stops with a thumping sound a few inches in.

“No,” Eddie croaks. “No, because I’m scared of eating you.”

 _I will not eat her,_ Venom says, at the same time Annie says: “Eddie, have you been drinking?”

“I don’t trust you!” he hisses. In response there’s pain, sudden and sharp, from that same place just below his ribcage. Eddie jerks backwards, stumbling and almost falling onto his ass on the floor. His heart is beating too hard again, a steady thudding in his ears. He covers them with his hands.

“Eddie,” she says through the door, “for god’s sake, just let me in.”

Eddie doesn’t move, and Anne reaches forward: he sees her right hand push through the little gap in the door, moving in to try to slide the chain off the latch that way. There’s a thin silver bracelet hanging off her wrist, glinting in the yellow light coming in through the windows.

Eddie jerks forward, grabs her hand.

“Eddie,” she says and tries to yank the hand back. “What the—”

The bracelet slides off her wrist easily once he’s got a grip on it. And then it’s in his mouth, smooth and nice and still warm from her skin, sliding painfully but easily down his throat.

He swallows.

“Oh god,” he says as he looks up again, as he meets her wide eyes through the sliver of open door. “Annie, I am _so sorry_. I am so, so sorry.”

“Eddie,” Anne says, “what the _fuck_.”

 

**8.**

 

“That wasn’t impressive.” She has sat Eddie down on the edge of his bed, and is standing in front of him, her purse set on the floor next to him and her wrist conspicuously bare. It should be awkward, maybe, being so close to a bed like this, now that they’re not together. Not today, though. Not when she’s looking at him with a mixture of pity and deep concern. Mostly pity.

He had told her everything, of course. He’d even showed her what he’d done to the wall. Anne had looked worried, but honestly only about 10% more worried than she’d looked when he’d run into her a week after their breakup. He’d been on quite a bender then, although at that point he hadn’t eaten any walls.

“You could have torn my arm off,” she goes on, and he can tell by the way she’s looking at him that she’s not really talking to _him_. “You can’t just make him grab people like that, Venom.”

“He’s not listening,” Eddie says weakly. He has his hands pressed into the mattress on either side of his hips: he feels like he'll collapse otherwise. It’s barely working. His hands, his arms, the front of his shirt, are all still covered with dust from the wall, sticking to him with the sweat. He can feel slightly larger chunks of it stuck to his hands, gritty between his damp palms and the sheets.

She leans in closer over him. Eddie can smell her perfume, her toothpaste. He hopes that _she_ can’t smell too much from the bed. He hasn’t washed the sheets in a while, and it must smell like—

“Well, start listening,” she says. “That was bad, Venom. You hear me? Bad. Bad. All of this, trying to hide from everyone. And what you’ve done to Eddie? _Very very bad._ ”

Inside Eddie, under all the layers of pain and fear pulling at him, the symbiote actually seems to shrink back a little. Why doesn’t it work when _he_ lectures Venom like that?

Still, he’s happy someone is doing the job, and—he’s just happy that Annie here, even if she’s looking at him like that. He still feels like he wants to either eat a building or curl up and die, but the panic from before has eased up to something dull and almost bearable. He smiles up at her, a little shakily.

“God, Eddie,” she says. “You look like you’ve been making out with a chunk of fiberglass.”

 _Don’t give him ideas_ , he wants to say. Instead he reaches up to touch his mouth. It stings; the whole bottom half of his face feels swollen. He can’t imagine how it looks.

"You look like you tried to eat a cat while it was still alive."

"No cats," he says. "Just other things."

“Well, Venom,” she says. “This is a chance to prove how sorry you are before we go on. Fix Eddie’s mouth. The poor guy can barely talk.”

Silence for a moment. Then: _tired_.

“He says he’s tired.”

She crosses her arms. The look on her face is not even a glare; that would take more effort than she is putting in. It’s just a look that says _I can escalate this in ways you could never imagine_. And finally, he feels Venom moving inside him.

The symbiote flows forward, up through his throat, tingly as it pushes out through the skin on the bottom half of his face, down through his palate to fill his swollen mouth. A strange, warm, pulling sensation, like light suction everywhere it’s touching, and then the pain eases. The goo withdraws, filtering back inside him.

She’s still looking down at him, eyebrows raised. “Wow,” she said. “I… didn’t think it’d look so weird.”

“Sorry?” Eddie says. It doesn’t hurt to talk now.

She shakes her head.

“Annie, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you he was still here, I fucked up, I—”

“Enough,” she says. “Limited time. We can—make a plan. Based on the information we have.”

He nods, still distracted by actually being able to swallow again without it feeling like he's eating glass. She reaches down into her purse, pulls out a pen and a little day planner, and flips to an empty page at the back.

“Okay then,” she says. “How long does it take? This—uh—the process.”

 _Not long,_ Venom says _._

“Not long,” Eddie repeats, and his voice shakes a little.

"Are we talking a month? A week? This morning?"

 _Not this morning_ , Venom says, and he repeats it.

“Okay,” she says again, a bit slower this time. “I will, uh, take that into account. How is the—how is it going to get out of you?”

He looks down at himself, the filthy damp fabric covering his torso. “I mean, Venom just kind of—goes in and out when he wants to, like he just did. I guess the smaller symbiote'll do that too.”

She writes that down. “Is it going to need to go into another person right away? To use them as a host?”

Eddie looks up at her, blinks.

“You didn’t think of that, did you.”

“… No.” 

“Eddie. Come on. You haven’t asked Venom any of this yourself?”

He swallows. “I was scared. I didn’t want to think about it.”

“Eddie, you’re a _reporter_ —”

“This isn’t a _story_ —”

“Enough. Fine. Whatever. It’s not important. We’ll ask him now. You got anything to say for yourself in there, Venom? Is this ba—is this thing is going to hurt anyone?”

Silence. “C’mon, V,” Eddie says, a little pleadingly.

Finally, he speaks again. _It will not hurt anyone else. It should survive without a host._

Eddie exhales. “He says no. He says it’ll be fine.”

She nods. “He’s never lied to you, has he?”

Eddie tries to think back. Venom definitely had _omitted_ important things in the past, and maybe on occasion he’s misled him a little, but outright lies? “No,” he says.

“Me neither,” Anne says. She starts writing something else down. “All right. What food are you craving? What else do you want to eat?”

“Sand,” Eddie says.

She pauses, pen hovering above the page. “Are you sure? I had a dog that almost died eating sand when I was a kid.”

“Sand,” Eddie says.

She writes it down. “Anything else?”

“Just… sand.”

“Okay,” she says. “Sand. Why the hell not.” She clicks the pen closed, puts the pen and the notebook away and takes out her phone. “I can’t stay long, I have court this morning. Dan’ll be at the hospital already. I’ll message him, but maybe it’s better if you try going in and—”

 ** _NO_** , Venom yells in his head, and Eddie jumps.

She rolls her eyes. “Relax, Venom, you enormous alien baby. I’ll message him myself. And I should be back by this afternoon. That okay?”

It's not okay. He does not want to be alone. But he nods, exhales. The pain in his mouth is gone, but the one under his ribcage is still there, throbbing.

Anne pauses now, phone still in hand. “How are you doing, Eddie?”

“I’m okay,” Eddie says, “how are you?”

“Tired. Skipped my coffee this morning to get here. But that’s not what I meant. How do you feel about this? Is it something you’re okay with?”

She’s eyeing him carefully. He knows he looks pitiful, slumped over on the bed like this, wet and filthy. “Yes,” he says, automatically.

“You sure about that?”

“Yes,” Eddie says. He wipes his mouth, which doesn’t really achieve anything, since the back of his hand is as dirty as the rest of him. Maybe he means it. Maybe he’s just trying to justify the answer he’s already given her. But it’s inevitable, after all, so he might as well roll with it. And he wants to help Venom, because even though Venom is a stupid idiot slime bastard, he seems even more affected by this than Eddie is.

Anne doesn’t look convinced. “Well, Venom, clearly you’re listening in there,” she says eventually. “You take care of him.”

Silence inside his head.

“He says okay,” Eddie says, because apparently he isn’t as good at telling the truth as an alien symbiote that had originally planned to destroy the earth.

“Good,” Anne says. “You’re lucky we owe you one for saving humanity, Venom. All right. Is there anywhere good around here to get a coffee?”

“No,” Eddie says, and it’s the truth this time.

She leans in to touch him on the shoulder. Then she brings some stuff in from the kitchen that she puts down on the table beside the bed, and then leaves.

He hopes her hand didn’t get that dirty.

Eddie eases himself down on his side on the bed. He is hungry again, but on top of that he just feels _sick_ , the type of pained, cramped feeling in his chest and abdomen that he last remembers from a bout of stomach flu. He pulls the blankets over himself, because it's cold, but then he sweats and kicks them off again. It’s not bright in the apartment, but the light hurts.

He shouldn’t have let her leave. He shouldn’t have done a lot of things.

The bed smells of old sweat, of incredibly good sex. _Your fault_ , he says to Venom in his head, _all your stupid fault_ , but he doesn’t have the strength to get angry, and Venom doesn't answer anyway.

He lies still, hears the traffic increase on the street outside, hears one of the neighbors leave for work while talking loudly on his cell phone. The room gets brighter. The ache is still there, in his side, under his ribs. Eddie rubs at it, pushing hard at the skin with his hand, and it eases the pain somewhat so he keeps doing it, toning it down to a stroking motion when his hand gets tired. He still hurts, but it’s more bearable this way. He closes his eyes.

He’s almost drifting off to sleep when he feels it.

It’s movement, but perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising—the thing had to be growing _somewhere_ , and it might as well be there. What is surprising is the _feel_ of it, pushing against his skin: it’s not smooth and goopy and amorphous, like he would think a smaller version of a symbiote should be. Instead Eddie can feel—a series of small, hard bulges, pressing up against the inside of his skin as it moves.

It feels like teeth.

Eddie swallows, opens his eyes. “Venom?”

No answer, and he closes his eyes again and thinks back to what the symbiote had said, what Eddie hadn’t noticed him saying because Eddie is tired, hungry, and very, very dumb.

_It will not hurt anyone else._

“V,” he says. “Will _me and you_ be okay?”

 _Tired_ , Venom says.

Shit, Eddie thinks.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  EDDIE CRAVES THAT MINERAL. Thank you again for all the nice comments, they bring me so much joy ❤️  
> 

**9.**

 

He sleeps, somehow.

It’s too hot in the apartment; Eddie is aware of this even while he’s asleep. After a while he wakes, and after an unsteady and very nearly embarrassing trip to the bathroom he just peels off his damp pajamas and underwear, tossing them onto the floor next to the bed. Anne had left a glass of water on the bedside table, next to his phone; he drinks it, then sinks back down onto the mattress, rubbing at his abdomen and kicking the covers away from where they might touch his skin. He’s still hot, and he is hungry too, but neither of those things is a match for his current “too tired to move” status.

He should ask Venom more questions. He should push deeper into what the symbiote had meant when he’d said that the thing inside him wouldn’t _hurt anyone else_. Anne had looked at him like he was an idiot for not questioning Venom enough, even though it’s Eddie’s own body on the line. His own life, maybe.

Then again, Eddie _is_ an idiot.

He squeezes his eyes shut against the sunlight in the apartment and pulls a pillow over his head.

It works, surprisingly: in the dark, he’s able to lie still and not think more easily, and soon it all just melts away into the background: the sucking emptiness in his stomach, the ache and the heat in his whole body, the deep, penetrating pain in his side.

And then he’s asleep again, and soon Venom is there, somehow, his long pink tongue touching skin, curling down across Eddie’s bare chest, where the pain under Eddie’s ribs remains, sharp and hot. Teeth scrape at the site of the hurt, pressing into the tender skin.

Eddie lies there, his eyes closed, fingers clenching at the pillow that’s still pulled over his head. Feels himself suck the fabric of the pillowcase back against his lips as he draws in breath.

“It hurts,” he says into the damp fabric, and he wants Venom to know it’s not a _good_ hurt; he doesn’t have to say that part, this is something Venom always understands.

And sure enough, Venom gets gentler, nuzzling at the spot and barely grazing it with his teeth.

Eddie moans in relief; Venom still understands. He shoves aside the pillow, reaches down to find any part of Venom he can touch. He grasps at the slimy surface of a thin tentacle near his stomach, strokes at it. It arches up against his skin.

Eddie’s breathing harder now in the cooler open air, his cock twitching between his legs. It seems inappropriate, letting Venom do this to him when Eddie is like this, when Eddie still wants so very much to strangle him. But if he was in the habit of making good decisions about sex, he wouldn’t be here right now, and so he lets it happen, lets another long tentacle slide down and wrap around his dick while Venom’s mouth keeps brushing so gently against the pain.

“God,” Eddie groans. His mouth is dry; his stomach twists inside him. He wants more, but he is so weak, so he just pushes his hips forward pathetically, letting the tentacle around him do all the work. His side still hurts so much, and he’s too warm and so _hungry_ , but being touched like this almost makes all of that bearable. “Please, keep going.”

Venom does, and Eddie bites down on his lip and turns his head to press his face into the wrinkled sheets under him, and he needs this distraction _so much_ , because he hurts and he’s probably going to die soon and that all seems okay right now because he is already _close_ —

—and then there’s a loud thumping noise that echoes through his whole body, and Eddie jumps in surprise, and the symbiote’s teeth sink into his flesh.

Eddie shrieks and yells “what the _fuck_ ,” lifting his head off the bed, but all that does is let him see those curved teeth digging in deeper. Latched onto him, tearing, like Venom is trying to—

There’s another noise, and Eddie wakes up.

He’s alone on the bed, bright afternoon light coming in through the window. He’s alone; Venom is nowhere to be seen, and silent even in Eddie’s head. The skin on his side is tender, but it’s smooth and unbroken when Eddie runs his hand along it.

All a dream, then. Except for his erection. That part apparently had been perfectly happy to make its way back into the waking world with him.

Eddie exhales, hears a little moaning noise come out of his mouth. His heart is beating so fast. And then another thumping noise makes him scream and almost fall out of the bed.

A knock at the door. That’s all it is. Someone is at the door.

“Delivery,” a male voice calls, sounding both annoyed and scared. The doors in this place don’t block sound very well. He probably thinks Eddie is either jerking off or being murdered. Or both at the same time; maybe he thinks Eddie is into that shit.

“Get it together, Eddie,” he says over the sound of his own heartbeat.

He reaches down to grab the top sheet, which is currently crumpled down around the foot of the bed, and wraps it around his waist. Runs a hand again over the painful spot on his side: he doesn’t feel anything moving there, but there is no way he’d imagined what he’d felt this morning: Eddie isn’t that lucky.

The rest of him isn’t doing much better. His skin feels so hot, and his _stomach_ —

“Please don’t make me eat the delivery guy,” he says as he stands up, holding on to the edge of the nightstand for support until his heart calms down enough that it no longer feels like it’ll break a rib. He tries to take a deep breath, but his body doesn’t seem to want to do that, so he just goes for it, staggering towards the door by force of sheer stupid will.

He manages to make it there without throwing up or dying, and apparently there’s a reward for his suffering: the young guy on the other side of the door is holding a large brown paper bag that looks like it weighs a good 30 pounds. Eddie starts salivating at the sight.

“Mr Brock?” the man says, politely, like Eddie has not kept him waiting for several minutes and then appeared sweaty and half naked with a filthy sheet wrapped around his waist.

“Sorry. Thank you.” Eddie yanks the bag out of the man’s hands, tears open the sticker holding it closed. The smaller bag inside says _Decorative Sand,_ and has a picture of a flower display on it, but none of that matters because Eddie can _smell_ the stuff already, and it’s enough to make him forget the pain at his side and everything else. He’s drooling like he’s just got his hands on a hamburger after fasting for a week and then smoking several bowls.

He rips open the clear plastic with both hands, letting both the paper bag and the sheet around his waist slip down to the floor as he kneels down over his new sandy oasis of mineral heaven.

Eddie pushes one handful of sand into his mouth, then another, giant sticky globs of it mixing with the spit in his mouth and sliding down his throat.

 _Wonderful_ , Venom says inside Eddie’s head, the first time he’s spoken since Eddie woke up, and god, Eddie has to agree. It _is_ wonderful, and definitely good enough to have woken Venom from whatever sleep-mode he had been in. Eddie stops eating for a moment to anticipate the feeling of his hunger fading, just like it had last night with the seashells.

And... the sand is good. It’s definitely good, but—it’s not as good as before. The satisfaction doesn’t go deep and all through him, like it had last night.

Eddie grunts, irritated. Maybe he needs to eat more.

The pause in eating has given him time to notice something else that had rolled out of the paper bag when he dropped it. Eddie picks the new object up with his left hand while he’s pushing another handful of sand into his mouth with his right. It’s a small plastic tub with a sealed lid, and the label says _Calcium Carbonate Powder_.

Eddie’s not sure why it’s here, but it looks pretty good as well, and it won’t hurt to just mix it in with his precious sand. He rips the lid off, tears open the inner seal with his teeth, and then he hears a tiny shuffling noise from in front of him.

He looks up. The delivery guy is still standing in front of the door to the apartment. He has taken a step backwards, back into the hallway, and he is staring down at Eddie in silence. He doesn’t seem to be able to move.

“Sorry,” Eddie says. He grabs the top sheet from the floor with the hand that’s not tipping the calcium powder into the open bag of sand, uses it to cover his crotch. “I got distracted. I’ll get you your tip.”

He goes to stand up, but the delivery guy just takes another step back away from the door.

“Wait,” Eddie says, but the man turns and starts to run. Eddie can hear his footsteps fading as he bolts down the stairs.

It probably would have been too difficult to stand up and find his wallet, anyway, and so Eddie just settles back down again with his bag of sand. Some of the calcium powder had spilled when he moved to stand up, and he scoops it up off the floor with his hand and licks it off his palm that way. It tastes like happiness.

 

**10.**

 

Half an hour later, the bag of sand is half gone, and the tub of calcium is completely empty. Eddie is exhausted, his stomach sore and heavy, his mouth almost too dry to swallow. He sits beside the half-empty bag, one hand rubbing at the painful patch under his ribs. It’s still too warm in the apartment, and the sand is sticking to his skin with the sweat that’s come up: it’s all over his hand, his arm, his chest. It’s caked on his face, in his hair even.

None of that is the bad part, though. The bad part is that he still feels _hungry_.

Since this bullshit had started, Eddie’s hunger has been fading, then returning, then fading again. He’s had periods where it has been okay. Now—it’s weakened slightly, but it’s still _there_ , and that fact is almost worse than the pain under his ribs, almost worse than the fact that he no longer seems able to take a full breath when he wants to.

He’s eaten _so much_. If he keeps eating and eating and it doesn’t help, maybe that means he will just—

He groans. He doesn’t want to keep thinking. No thought is going to go anywhere good right now.

“V, I could use your input here,” he says out loud, even though it’s hard to talk. He tries to swallow down some of the grittiness in his mouth, but he doesn’t seem to have enough spit left to make it work.

 _Tired_ , Venom says.

“I’m getting sick of you saying that.” Eddie hardly hear his own voice, it’s so croaky, but whatever, Venom can understand him. “I told Annie—I said I was okay with this. You heard me say that, right? I’m trying to _help_ you, idiot. But you have to work with me.”

A pause. Then: _You should rest too, Eddie_.

And when Venom speaks, Eddie feels it again, clear: That sensation of protectiveness, and this time some of it is _definitely_ aimed at Eddie, as well.

Eddie breathes out. It’s a—a nice feeling, when he focuses on it. Like getting smiled at by someone you love, or having your hand squeezed, and given Eddie’s lack of other options right now it’s something he grasps at tightly. It’s enough to make the pain in his body seem further away.

He relaxes a little bit, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders, the pounding in his chest easing off. He wants more. He needs so much more. He’s so scared.

“V,” he says. “Can you hold me again? Like you did when we were eating the shells?”

_Tired._

“Please? Venom, please.”

He waits, breathing as deep and steady as he can and feeling his pulse pound hard through the blood vessels in his head, and then—he feels it, that warm black goo melting through his skin from the inside, spreading over him.

Eddie lets out a little cry of relief, and moves to take hold of one of the tentacles that’s moving over him. Guides it so it is touching the sore place right under his ribs.

Venom takes over then, rubbing back and forth over the patch of skin, and Eddie drops his head forward and moans. It’s almost better than the dream. Even his dick is responding more appropriately now, which is to say that it’s not responding at all. He can get a nice, normal pain-massage from an alien symbiote tentacle without it getting weird.

He relaxes more, eventually sinks down onto one elbow, and then just lies down completely next to the half-eaten bag of sand. It’s cool down here on the floor, smooth and nice, and Venom is around him so tight and he is _here_ , and everything else just fades out.

He doesn’t notice that he’d left the door to the apartment open until he hears the new voice coming from that direction.

“Eddie? Can I come in?”

Eddie raises his eyes to look at the tall man standing in the doorway.

Dan.

And then Eddie is immediately wrenched backwards, his body yanked across the floor until his back slams into the side of the leather couch.

_AWAY. BAD MAN BAD DOCTOR I TOLD YOU AWAY._

“Venom, I’m too tired for this—”

_AWAY AWAY AWAY_

“He is here to _help_ us—”

 _AWAY AWAY AWAY AWAY_ **_AWAY_ **

The yelling in his head doesn’t stop, and doesn’t stop, and Eddie does the only thing he can think of: he puts his hands over his ears and screams.

Venom keeps going, but if there is one thing the last few days have given Eddie, it’s the power to fuel a _lot_ of endless screaming.

He keeps going and going, and soon Venom has trailed off and slipped back into his body like he’s hurt, and Eddie opens his eyes to find that Anne’s new boyfriend is somehow still standing there in the doorway, and has not run away.

When Venom has withdrawn, sulking, to the very back of Eddie’s mind, he takes his hands off his ears. “Sorry,” he wants to say, but he’s screamed too much and his voice is barely working, and Dan probably can’t hear him from the door.

Dan doesn’t even look awkward. “Is it safe for me to come in now?” he says, as if everything is entirely normal, as if he hadn’t just walked in on Eddie naked and screaming on the floor while covered in sand.

“I think so,” Eddie says.

Dan closes the door carefully behind him, glancing back into the corridor to make sure no one’s been attracted by the noise. Then he approaches, cautious, like Eddie is a wounded animal that he is trying to help but doesn’t quite trust not to be rabid. He has a very expensive-and-professional-looking black bag with a lot of pockets and a shoulder strap, and when he is close he sets it down carefully on the floor.

Eddie looks up at him. He is naked, and the sheet is all the way over near the bag of sand that Venom had dragged him away from. He tries to draw his legs up a little bit to cover himself, but even that feels like a lot of effort. One hand has slipped back to his side already, rubbing the skin there where it hurts the most.

Dan is kneeling down next to him now. “Hey,” he says, gentle and still cautious. “Is this okay, me being this close?”

Eddie nods, because it is okay, and Dan’s face relaxes for a second before a frown sets in. “Eddie, you seem unwell.”

“I’m pregnant,” Eddie says. “And I’ve been eating sand.”

“That’s okay, buddy. Did you get the calcium I sent too? Anne told me what you’d been eating, and it sounded like you might need some of it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s gone.”

“You ate _all of it_?”

“I’m still hungry.”

Dan seems to be trying to control the expression on his face. “Can I, uh, feel your forehead? I’ll move slowly.”

Eddie nods again, bracing in case Venom reacts, and Dan reaches out his hand toward him.

Venom stays silent.

Dan draws his hand away. He might still be trying to control his expression, but Eddie can still see enough of what he’s clearly thinking. He shrinks back against the leather of the couch.

“I can’t go to the hospital,” he says.

“I know.”

“I said I was okay with it. I said—”

“Eddie. Anne told me everything. Just look at me now, that’s what’s important. Good. Can you follow my finger with your eyes?”

Eddie does it. He can feel his lip trembling.

“We’re just gonna do one thing at a time, Eddie.” Dan moves an arm like he’s going to pat his shoulder, then seems to think better of it. “Will you tell me what you ate today?”

“Sand. And the calcium.”

“Just that? No human food?”

He shakes his head.

“Have you been feeding yourself at all? Or just the other guy?”

“I thought they were the same thing,” Eddie says weakly.

“It’s okay. We’ll work on it together. I need to see your hand for a second.”

Eddie shoves his hand forward quickly, just in case Venom is feeling up to complaining by now, but there’s still no reaction.

Dan’s skin feels cool; he turns Eddie’s hand to face palm downwards and then pinches the skin on the back of his hand. “When was the last time you drank some water?”

“This morning.”

Dan looks up at him. “Eddie. You’ve literally been eating sand.”

“I don’t feel thirsty.” It comes out defensive.

Dan is still holding his hand; he squeezes it now. “This is only an opinion, Eddie, but I’m thinking some of your body’s own signals are getting crowded out by the—um—all those other needs. We have to try taking better care of you, too.”

Eddie nods.

“Good,” Dan says and smiles and squeezes his hand again, then lets go and stands up. “We’ll start with some water and go from there.”

“Thank you,” Eddie says up at him, and he means it. Having Venom actually touch him, and now this as well, is so _nice_ , makes Eddie feel warm all over in a way that’s completely different from the uncomfortable heat that’s still all over his body. It’s so overwhelming he has to swallow down an urge to cry, but then again he’s not sure he’d actually be able to produce tears at this point.

“See, Venom?” he whispers as Dan fills a glass of water in the kitchen. “He’s not that bad.”

Venom doesn’t answer.

Dan returns with a glass, which Eddie makes an effort to reach out for. “Drink that slowly.”

The cold liquid is amazing against his dry mouth and in his throat: his lips are dry, too, and even the glass feels nice against them. Eddie ignores the instruction and just gulps the water all down.

Dan doesn’t look mad, though. “Does your side hurt?” he asks when Eddie’s done.

Eddie looks down; he’s still clutching at it with his other hand. “That’s where—where it’s growing.”

“Okay. Okay, Eddie.” He frowns, leans closer. “Do you mind if I take a look so I—”

 _NO,_ Venom yells in his head _._

Eddie jumps, hitting the back of his head against the side of the couch. “So _now_ you wake up again?” he hisses.

_I WILL BITE HIS ARM OFF AT THE SHOULDER_

“It’s okay, Venom.” Dan holds his hands up like he’s surrendering. “It can wait. We’re going to go slowly. We have time. Sound good?”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says.

“It’s okay. Everything is okay. You’re fine.” Dan’s voice is still calm, but there’s something forced about the way he looks; it makes Eddie think that this is the same voice and expression that Dan must use when he is telling patients that they have cancer growing all over their body and that their insurance has also just cut them off. He bites back a little undignified noise of fear.

A small, hidden part of him wishes that Dan had pushed him to go to a hospital. Wishes, maybe, that Venom had been right about Dan after all.

“How bad is it,” Eddie says quietly. “How bad do I look? Is it bad that it’s growing there?”

Dan gives a tight smile. “Let’s just try to get some more liquids in you,” he says, and he is _absolutely_ giving Eddie that _you have all the cancer_ look again now, and all that pleasant warmth that Eddie had been feeling before is already gone. 

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for all the kind comments, they mean more to me than you can imagine.

**11.**

 

“A shower should help you feel a bit better,” Dan says from next to where Eddie’s standing, resting one hand on the bathroom wall to keep himself upright. Dan is holding his hand under the spray of water to check the temperature. “You’d better sit down in the tub when you’re in, though, so you don’t fall over.”

 _He wants something from us,_ Venom says in Eddie’s head _._ It’s loud even over the sound of the water.

“Shut up,” Eddie says to him, and Dan politely pretends like he hadn’t heard anything.

“I won’t make the water too hot, all right?” he says.

Eddie nods, his palm still resting against the tiled wall. His skin is still so hot. The tile is slippery under his hand already, wet with the sweat. His stomach feels strained and heavy.

“Do you need help getting in?”

Eddie shakes his head. It’d be good to have a steadying hand, because standing and moving is hard, but Venom’s attitude toward Dan has not improved and Anne will not be happy with him if his symbiote bites one of her boyfriend’s limbs off.

He steps over the side of the tub, twitching a little at the sudden feeling of the lukewarm water on his skin, and sits down, his knees up in front of him.

 _He will hurt us again,_ Venom says _._ Eddie continues to ignore him.

“You just call me if you need anything, Eddie, does that sound okay?” Dan says. “I’ll leave the door open.”

Eddie nods. It’d be better if Dan would stay, but he bites down on his lip before he can say anything about it. Dan has been helping him since he got here, ordering Eddie food and drinks and making sure he eats everything. It’s okay if he needs a few minutes alone away from the alien that keeps expressing its desire to rip his face off and hit him with it.

He sits, the surface of the tub smooth and cool under his ass as the stream of water hits his chest and knees and calves. The water running down the drain in front of him looks vaguely discolored in the bright light of the bathroom. Little droplets of water are catching on the hair on his legs.

Everything is so hot. His hand is already pressed back against his side.

“I feel better,” he says out loud, into the damp air of the bathroom.

Venom doesn’t answer, maybe because he can see inside Eddie’s head and knows it’s bullshit, or maybe because he’s just not listening.

And it’s _almost_ true: the food that Dan had spent much the afternoon making him eat is helping. The awful hunger from before is down to a background hum, no longer something that’s about to start hollowing him out from the inside.

But Eddie still hurts. He hurts almost worse.

He moves his fingers over the wet patch of skin on the right side of his abdomen: it’s hot, slippery under his fingers. The pain has expanded now, down his side and up under the bony jut at the edge of his ribs. Eddie moves his fingers back and forth over the skin, then digs them in a bit deeper. It’s not painful to do it, because it’s not _tender_ : the pain is just deep and steady, as if something is pushing on a nerve in there. Pressing down with his fingers doesn’t make it worse.

Something else happens, though.

There’s movement: something deep inside that twitches and then swells and pulses under his fingers, like it’s reacting to Eddie’s touch.

“Venom?” Eddie says uncertainly, quiet under the sound of the water. “V, hey, what the fuck?”

No answer.

Eddie moves his legs, shifts his ass forward so he’s in as much of a lying position as he can get into in the too-small tub. He has a better view of his abdomen now, and the spot under his ribs looks normal. But when Eddie digs his fingers into the skin some more, he feels it again, that movement, and then—

It’s those teeth, those fucking tiny _teeth_ , pushing up and outwards, and this time he’s looking right at them and the light in the room is bright and Eddie can _see_ them, little nubs pushing out against the wet skin on the side of his belly. They press up into the skin from below, and then press further, and Eddie watches, strokes across one small raised lump with his wet index finger.

 _Eddie_ , Venom says.

It’s there again, in his voice and in Eddie’s head, that protectiveness, and Eddie can almost feel what it is based on. It’s a nice feeling to be next to, even if it’s not his own, and Eddie lets himself zone out into it, moving the tip of his finger back and forth over those tiny protrusions on his skin.

The water keeps flowing. He hears voices, faintly, outside the room, but really all that’s here is the tub and the water and the fuzzy feeling inside him and that painful press against the inside of his skin, hot and sharp.

Those little bulges push outwards more, and Eddie keeps watching, his breath steady. They move, a tiny wave under his skin, and then the line they’re forming splits into two, making a stretched oval shape like a mouth inside him. The two lines push out on either side of Eddie’s index finger.

Eddie digs the finger in deeper, until it hurts, watches as the lines of teeth under his skin disappear, appear again, then again, like they're making an effort to break through. The third time, the teeth push out so hard against his skin that he sucks in a breath with the pain.

Or makes an attempt to, anyway. He can’t actually breathe that deeply anymore.

The teeth move away from the surface of his skin, but this is followed by a deep lurching movement inside him, sliding up and then suddenly down, like the thing is looking for somewhere to move. Another sudden movement upward hits him like a punch in the chest. He groans out loud, and then it gets worse.

It's like getting punched from the inside, and not in a good way. He’s groaning again, his hand clutching uselessly at his side. It doesn’t feel good anymore. The protectiveness is gone now: he just feels sick. The thing is moving so much, and all this movement feels so _sudden_ , and maybe that’s it, maybe Dan’s plan had worked too well. Maybe fixing the worst of Eddie’s hunger means that the thing inside him feels better too.

He breathes in, out. As deep as he can. It’s okay. Dan is right outside. Eddie is going to be okay, even if he is bruised and wet and sore and too hot and too scared to look at himself in the mirror. He will be okay. Venom is always able to get out through Eddie’s skin easily—

But this thing clearly can’t get out that way, because it’d been _pushing_ at him...

Another movement deep inside him, and Eddie jumps, his heels slipping on the wet surface on the tub, and he tries to gasp and this time it doesn’t work _at all_.

“Dan,” he tries to say, his voice choked. He can’t breathe. The little asshole inside him is doing something to him and he can’t _breathe_.

He’s up on his knees somehow, almost slipping and falling as he crawls out over the edge of the tub, his wet body hitting the tiled floor with all the grace of a dying manatee. “Dan. Dan.”

 _Not the doctor,_ Venom says _._

Eddie ignores him. “Dan, I can’t breathe,” he yells, and then the door pushes open inward more Dan is in front of him, holding that expensive-looking black bag he’d brought to the apartment, and Eddie says: “It’s killing me, I can’t breathe.”

“Eddie,” Dan is saying, and he’s down on his knees at Eddie’s level now. “You’re breathing right now, Eddie. You’re just panicking. Hey, buddy. Look at me.”

 _Do not look at him,_ Venom says _._

“You’re hyperventilating, Eddie, you need to—”

_Look at the bag, Eddie. He wants to hurt us._

“The bag?!” Eddie chokes out. The thing is still moving, he's going to—

_The doctor has things in the bag, Eddie. He brought things to hurt us again._

He coughs, splutters. “Venom, I told you already—”

_Metal there is metal in the bag Eddie metal in the bag I can smell the metal he will cut us up hurt us steal steal I can smell_

“Venom,” Dan says, “We’re just trying to take care of you.”

_He will hurt us. We must protect it, Eddie—_

Eddie puts his hands over his ears. The yelling is loud in his head, and it’s all too close, and if he could just get away—

 _He will_ **_hurt us_  **

Eddie gets up to run, pushing himself to his feet and shoving Dan out the way, and then immediately slips on the wet tile. He falls, his body dazed and heavy, and hits the bathroom floor like he’s trying to punch it with his face.

 

 

**12.**

 

 

The pain in his side is still there, all that Eddie feels. The movement has slowed to almost nothing, but the heavy, dull ache is there under his ribs, the weight shifting in a different way than his own body. It’s worse than the pain in his head, which is saying a lot.

“Ow,” he tries to say, but nothing comes out. 

There's someone next to him at first, and then there are just voices, somewhere, one male and one female, talking about him, but Eddie is still caught somewhere else, curled up and wet with water that’s turned as warm as blood on his hot skin, his hand tight against his stomach, and only pieces of the voices come through.

 

_…just needs to…_

 

_…about organ failure…_

 

_…depends on what direction that it decides to try to…_

 

_…enough room…_

 

_…keeping him…_

 

_…going to kill…_

 

 

Eddie curls up tighter on the floor. Someone has laid out a towel right next to him, and he turns his head and pushes his bruised face down into the fabric, just like he does into the bedsheets when Venom is fucking him, but now the fabric is rough and Venom would never make him feel like his nose is broken; that is _bad_ pain.

The voices fade away, and sometime after that Eddie hears a footstep on the tile and turns up to look. Dan is standing at the door, holding a cup of something. When he sees Eddie looking up at him, his face goes deliberately calm.

“Anne brought you a smoothie,” he says. “Lots of protein in it. They added extra.”

“Where is she?" Surprisingly, his voice works. “Where’s Annie?”

“She’s taking a walk,” Dan says. He’s sitting down on the floor again, close to the towel laid out next to Eddie. The shower is off, he notices, and someone has draped another towel over Eddie's lower half, as well. It shifts against his hip when he tries to move. “It was a little difficult for her to see you, Eddie,” Dan goes on. “Are you feeling better? Can you sit up?”

 _We will kill him_.

“Shut up,” Eddie says. But he looks over and sees that the black bag is still there, sitting upright on the tiled floor near the door. Dan had left it here the whole time.

He pushes himself up on one elbow, wincing and grunting with the effort: Dan moves like he’s about to reach out and help him, but then clearly thinks better of it. Eddie makes it into a sitting position with minimal dizziness, clutching the towel near his waist to make a token effort of covering himself.

“Good,” Dan says. “I don’t think you concussed yourself when you fell, you’re just exhausted. But…” He stops, then, and follows Eddie’s gaze. “Eddie,” he says, and seems to consider it for a moment. “Do you, um, want to see what’s in the bag?”

He nods, and Dan sets down the cup on the floor, carefully out of the way, and reaches out for the bag. He unzips it, and the bag splits open to reveal a two panels of black mesh pockets that look more organized than anything Eddie has ever owned in his life. Dan takes a little fabric case out of the largest of the pockets, and unzips this as well. He holds it out so Eddie can see what’s inside.

It’s still bright in the room. The instruments in the case are all metal, and mostly seem to consist of different types of scissors. It’s not until he sees the little sealed packets labeled _SURGICAL BLADES_ that he knows what he’s looking at.

“Oh,” he says. “I guess I should have expected that.”

Venom is in his head, as well, he can tell; reading the images that go through Eddie’s mind. The symbiote is going to freak out and explode at Dan again, and he can’t take it.

“Everything in the bag is there for an emergency,” Dan says. “I don’t want to use any of these things. But if I have to, and you want me to—if you need me to get this thing out of you in a hurry—”

“No,” Eddie says weakly. His face hurts. He already hurts so much. “I can’t.”

“Eddie,” He carefully zips up the case and sets it back in its mesh pocket, and then reaches out to touch Eddie’s bare shoulder, the first time he’s touched him since before the shower— _no no Venom will bite you no Dan seriously he has_ really _big teeth_ —

—But Venom has gone quiet, because apparently none of this this was fucking weird enough already. The symbiote feels almost… calm.

“Look at me, buddy,” Dan goes on. He is actually smiling. “I am going to do everything I can. I promise you, I will do everything I can to get you through this as easily and painlessly as possible. It’s what I am trained to do, okay?”

Eddie cannot answer. He clutches his hand tighter against his side, as if that can stop anything.

And inside him, Venom is still quiet. The symbiote is listening to Dan, and he’s _not angry_. Not at all. The symbiote’s feelings have turned lighter, warmer almost, like—

Like Venom _approves_.

“Oh you’re fine with him _now_ , are you?” Eddie hisses. “Cos it’s not gonna be _you_ with a scalpel in your stomach?”

_His plan might just be acceptable, Eddie._

“You idiot,” Eddie says to him, the hand that’s not clutching at a submerged alien fetus clenching into a fist. “You asshole. You fucking glorified tapeworm. You—”

“Are you doing okay, Eddie?” Dan says.

He is not. He’s so hot all over, and it hurts, and this room is so small, and Venom still inside him and it _hurts_.

Venom says: _We can trust the bad doctor for now, Eddie_. _Now eat his watch._

“ _No_ ,” Eddie says, and he closes his eyes, squeezes them shut as hard as he can despite the pain in his face from hitting the floor, because it’s the only thing he can think of doing.

When he opens them, Dan’s hand is still on his shoulder. His watch is right in front of Eddie’s face. It looks expensive.

“Eddie, why are you looking at my wristwatch?”

Eddie just looks at him.

Dan lets go of his shoulder, the friendly little _it’s-ok-I’m-a-doctor_ smile back on his face now, and he unlatches the watch from his wrist, slides it off. He presses it into Eddie’s hand. “As long as you drink the smoothie after this, all right, buddy?”

The watch feels heavy, slippery in his sweaty grasp as Eddie pushes it into his mouth. The metal case clinks against his teeth on the way in. It’s hard to swallow.

Dan looks pained as he watches Eddie do it, and Eddie hopes it’s just because eating it looks uncomfortable, and not because it had cost a lot of money. But it's probably because it cost a lot of money.

 _Good_ , says Venom once Eddie has done it, and he sounds even happier with both of them now. _Now, we must talk about acquiring fresh meat._

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you once again for all the nice comments, you wonderful people 

**13.**

 

 

“That was Anne,” Dan says, setting his phone down on the kitchen counter. He’s standing not far from Eddie, hovering near him, like he’s caught between giving Eddie space and making sure he’s close enough to catch him if his legs go out. “She’s found another butcher that’s still open. It’s about fifteen minutes away.”

Eddie grunts in approval. He’s near the sink, gripping the counter tight with one hand, using his other hand to eat the last of the instant mashed-potato mix that Dan had ordered earlier. The position stops him being able to hold onto his side, which is unfortunate, because rubbing the skin there like it’s an extremely needy and affectionate cat is the only thing that helps the pain. But he needs the support: his head still feels too light, and he’s having trouble with anything more than shallow breaths. If he falls over again Dan will probably make him go back to bed, and Eddie needs to keep doing this.

The other groceries are spread out across the counter, except for the ones that Eddie has already dropped onto the floor. Most of the food—the raw meat, the vegetables, the milk, the other attempts at protein—hadn’t looked good enough to touch.

He licks potato powder off his hand, wipes his palm on the boxers that Dan had helped him put on. The potato had been good, a nice thing to eat, but it doesn’t touch the worst of the restlessness that’s been growing in his body since Venom said _fresh meat_. It’s wrenching, a constant, cramping pull on his insides, like a new, improved type of hunger. There’s also a growing edge of something from the symbiote that feels like annoyance.

 _Heads_ , Venom says in his head for the fifth time in the last ten minutes as he wipes the back of his hand on his mouth. _Heads we need heads now it’s time for heads the brain inside the head you pull the bone open like a candy wrapper Eddie brains we need a lot we need heads we need_

“I told you to _wait_ ,” he hisses under his breath, and now he’s busy looking over the other objects on the counter, looking for anything, because his other hungers have receded but they are still _there_ , and maybe if he can satisfy something else, it will help distract from this  _main_ hunger until Anne gets back.

The kitchen counter itself no longer looks appetizing. Eddie almost feels bad for it that he’s not into it anymore.

“I guess that’s a good thing, though,” he says, and he leans forward, resting one forearm on the counter for balance now, to more closely examine the coffeemaker.

“What’s that, buddy?” Dan asks.

Eddie doesn’t answer, just lifts the lid of the coffeemaker’s filter basket. There’s old grounds in there, inside a brown paper filter, cold and damp and who knows how many days old now, covered with a thin wispy layer of white. He scoops some up with his fingers and pushes them against his mouth: it’s okay. Mostly. Not satisfying. Not as good as the mashed-potato powder.

Eddie lets the rest of the coffee clumps fall onto the tiled kitchen floor and grunts again. There’s better parts of the coffeemaker.

Behind him, the text message tone on Dan’s phone goes off, and he hears him pick it up. Eddie, for his part, picks up the empty coffee carafe from the warming plate: the handle is plastic, but it’s made of glass otherwise, and that glass is so shiny and reflective, like ice, like a beer bottle, like the skin of an apple, like blood.

_Snack Eddie we need heads snack_

“Yeah, I got you,” he says softly, and brings the carafe to his mouth.

“Eddie—” Dan says from somewhere nearby. “Eddie, hey, _wait_.”

A sudden hand on his arm makes him stagger, and the carafe slips out of his grip. The sharp movement causes something to shift and pull inside him on his right side, and Eddie’s hand slips off the counter, the room lurching and shifting like water until it stops with a jolt: Dan has caught him him around the shoulder.

The carafe hits the floor and cracks. Venom snarls loud in Eddie's head, but the symbiote is apparently holding fast to his decision to trust Dan: he doesn’t do anything else.

“You can’t eat glass, Eddie,” Dan says. He’s breathing hard, but clearly making an effort to be calm, even though he’d just come extremely close to having an alien tear his head off over snacktime. “I mean, um—listen, Venom. There’s still a bit of sand left in the living room. It’s the same thing. Do you want me to help Eddie over there so you guys can eat?”

A pause. Then:

 _Yes_ , Venom says, still sounding angry.

“Very good,” Dan says, and smiles.

With Dan supporting him, Eddie can return his hand to his side again. His skin feels hot, and as they walk to where he’d left the sand earlier something in there pulses upwards once or twice, like a strong heartbeat. He rubs at it.

Dan sits down with Eddie on the floor this time, close now, like he’s testing how far he can push Venom’s new tolerance. It works: Venom seems focused only on his host as Eddie dips his hand into the mostly-finished bag of sand, and doesn’t say anything about Dan sitting right next to him.

“That was Anne texting me,” Dan says as Eddie starts to eat. “She wants to let you know she found it, and she’s on her way back.”

Eddie can only make a muffled sound of approval around the mouthful of sand, but Dan doesn’t seem to mind. He goes on: “You still feeling okay, apart from that?”

Eddie nods. “Yes,” he mumbles. Venom might be hungry and desperate, but he’s consistently awake enough now to be _talking_ most of the time, and that’s better than the way he was before Dan got here. When Anne gets back from the butcher, and this particular need is out of the way, maybe things will be—well, they won’t be _okay_ , but maybe it’ll be _enough_ for a little while; maybe Venom will let him sleep through the night and all Eddie will have to worry about is the pain and the pulling and the thing trying to chew him from the inside. It’s still an improvement. It’s definitely an improvement.

Dan pats him on the back as he eats, and makes sure he drinks some water, and brings a damp handtowel from the bathroom to wipe his face with. After a little while he says: “Can I—” and moves his hand forward an inch toward his abdomen, and Eddie nods and moves his own hand out of the way.

Dan pushes the palm of his hand over the skin on Eddie’s bare right side, quick and efficient, like he’s trying to get the examination done before the symbiote notices. When he digs in a little with his fingers, something inside shifts in response, and Dan’s hand draws back like he’s surprised.

Eddie looks up, and apparently he does it quick enough that Dan doesn’t have time to hide the expression on his face. The man looks pale.

Eddie swallows the last little wet chunks of sand that had been caught in his mouth. “What do you think?” he asks.

“It’s fine,” Dan says, and his hand is back on Eddie’s shoulder, firm. “Everything’s fine in there, buddy.”

Eddie looks at him, but before he can continue the thought there’s a knock on the door, and Anne calls: “Hey, is it safe to come in? No one’s getting eaten?”

“It’s fine, Anne,” Dan calls back, and then turns back to Eddie and smiles, squeezes the hand on the shoulder. His face is back to normal.

 

 

**14.**

 

 

Anne unwraps the package on the kitchen island, spreading the white paper it had been wrapped in out around it. Dan, after a little gentle arguing, had helped Eddie sit up on the stool in the kitchen, and now Eddie leans in closer to look.

The sheep’s head stares back at him. Or it is a goat? He can’t tell. All of the skin is gone. The eye on the side of its head looks up at him like it’s angry.

“Sorry, little guy,” Eddie whispers down to it.

“Eddie, it can’t hear you,” Anne says. “Just eat it. I went to four butchers for this thing and these are _not_ walking shoes.”

Eddie doesn’t answer. Venom seems to be trying very hard to salivate even though he’s still inside Eddie’s body.

“Do you have a meat cleaver?” Dan asks. He is close, still, within catching-Eddie range. “If the head is going to be better for him raw, that’ll be the easiest way to get through the bones—”

He stops talking. Venom is already sliding out of the skin above Eddie’s wrist, covering his hand to make a fist. The fist lifts Eddie’s arm with it, brings it down hard on top of the defenseless sheep’s head. A sound that’s halfway between a crack and a squelch, like a bullwhip hitting a Halloween pumpkin that someone has left outside all through November, and teeth scatter across the surface of the kitchen island.

Anne says: “Oh, gross,” and Eddie pulls away the shattered pieces of cranium, Venom’s black goop already retracting into his hand as he works. The brain inside is only half-squished, wet and glistening like a beautiful pink jewel. Eddie’s hands are shaking.

 _Head head head brain head,_ Venom says and Eddie pushes the handful of brain into his mouth so fast that little chunks of it fall onto the counter.

 _Head head head,_ and Eddie scoops up the pieces, slippery between his fingers he’s moving so fast, bites off the pieces that are caught on the pieces of bone.

It’s good, but—

But—

No. He won’t think on that; it’s going to be okay, he just needs to try to eat more. Eddie grabs some of the teeth, pushes a handful into his mouth like popcorn. Picks up the broken jawbone and works the surviving teeth off of it, small and hard like candy in his mouth. He eats the tongue and the little pieces of meat attached to the bone parts. It’s good. It’s going to be okay. It’s good. It feels good.

But—

_Not enough, Eddie._

“You gotta be kidding me, V,” Eddie says around the eyeball he’s chewing.

_Not fresh enough. More will be better. Human is best._

“What is it, Eddie?” Anne asks, but he doesn’t answer.

It’s not going to be okay. It’s not. He can feel it. The worst of the terrible cramping inside him has faded, but he still needs more, so much more than he can ever get.

He leans forward against the kitchen island, rests his right arm against the surface even though the position causes a chunk of curved skull bone press into his skin. “I’m _tired_ ,” he says. He’s not sure who he is talking to.

 _More_.

“We can’t just get live human brains delivered,” he says, quieter.

“Tell him we can’t get _any_ brains delivered at this hour,” Anne adds.

_What sort of stupidity is that._

“He’s mad about it,” Eddie tells Anne weakly.

“Well, tell him to do something about it when this is over,” Anne says. “Maybe overnight brain delivery can be the next big tech startup.”

“We can get something fresher in the morning. Not human. But fresher.” Dan cuts in.

“Right,” Anne says. “Can your buddy wait for that without pitching a fit?”

 _No_ , Venom says.

Eddie ignores him. Yes, they can do that. The sheep-or-goat-or-whatever-sad-looking-animal-it-was has at least taken the edge off. It’s not enough for it to be _over_ , but it’s enough to let him hold out until morning. “I can wait,” he says.

 ** _No_**.

“Definitely can wait,” he says, louder, and even as he speaks he feels his own fingers curl until his nails are digging into the wooden surface of the island, until the nails of his other hand are cutting into the skin below his ribs.

“Good,” says Dan, and then he helps Eddie collect all of the teeth he’d missed.

He guides Eddie over to the bathroom and then to his bed, and Eddie pushes his head into the pillow that’s still damp with his sweat from before, and Anne turns the lamp off.

Eddie says “I can wait,” again, to no one in particular, and then he curls up on his side and tries to keep breathing steady. 

 

 

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

 

**15.**

 

He is going to be fine. He is going to be fine. He is going to be fine.

 

**16.**

 

It is barely past midnight and Venom won’t be quiet in his head and he is too warm and the hunger is already very bad again and there is no sheep’s head left and not even any of its teeth, but he will stay right in this bed until morning and he won’t move and he will be fine.

  

**17.**

 

Ten minutes later, Eddie pushes open the fire escape door that leads into the alley next to the apartment building. The air outside is cool, and damp: it’s sudden on his wet skin as he leans against the cold brick wall next to the door, one hand back on his side and the other clutching the cell phone he’d brought with him. He takes a breath, sucking in as much air as he can. It had been a long, difficult trip out of the building, and there’s a new cramping feeling growing around near his diaphragm now, like someone is squeezing a fist inside him. He’s shaky all over with the hunger.

A few more not-deep-enough breaths at least make him feel less like he is about to collapse into a puddle on the concrete, even though he is breathing in air that’s strongly flavored by the dumpster a few yards away. The cold of the wall is seeping into the too-warm bare skin on his back and shoulder. The ground is damp under his bare feet. He probably should have put some clothes on. He’s still only in his boxers.

 _Why did we sneak out, Eddie_ , Venom says. _We like Anne. We like the nice doctor now_.

The symbiote had asked the same question as they were slipping out of the apartment door, but now Eddie doesn’t have to be quiet and can actually answer. “Because Dan was asleep right next to my bed, and I wanted some distance between myself and any other human heads before it got bad enough for you to start yelling at me again.”

_A slip up would have been unfortunate, this is true. But we could always find another nice doctor._

“Venom, when this is over, we need to have a nice long talk about being friends with someone, and what it means when you…”

Eddie trails off. He’s seen something.

The alley is dim—the light above the fire escape had broken a while back and no one had ever replaced it—but there’s enough light coming in from the street to pick out something at ground level next to the dumpster a few yards away. A flash of movement.

Eddie turns to look closer, one shoulder pressed against the wall now.

He’s heard neighbors talking about the building’s rat problem. He has never actually seen one in his apartment, but maybe that was because his downstairs neighbor’s cat had been doing its job and eating them. Or maybe Venom had been eating them while Eddie was asleep; Eddie never asked.

He takes an unsteady step forward, still with his shoulder resting against the wall of the building.In front of him, out of the alley and on the other side of the street, someone passes, a lone male figure walking with shoulders drawn up against the cold. He looks delicious. 

“Come here, little guy,” he calls toward the dumpster, his voice creaky. But the movement in the shadows near the base of the dumpster is gone. Eddie is salivating.

Eddie takes another step, then another, until he’s right at the edge of the dumpster. He stops to try to catch his breath again, wipes his mouth with the back of the hand holding the phone. The dumpster-smell is not enough to stop the feeling of shivery emptiness in his stomach. “Here, rat,” he says, “come on. Come here.”

The rat, presumably, ignores him. Eddie shifts his weight, shifts so he's leaning against the flat metal wall of the dumpster. It’s not a particularly large one—about the same height as he is—and under normal circumstances, even without Venom’s help, Eddie could lift himself up inside without a thought. Now he tries, grabbing the edge with two hands, hooking his cell phone under his chin, and pulling. He immediately slips off, loses his balance, and falls onto his side with a heavy _thud_. 

“Ow,” Eddie moans against the concrete. The cell phone has skittered away, and the thing nesting under his ribs moves like it has been startled by the impact, bumping into what feels like a few vital organs in the process. Eddie hisses.

_Need to get in there, Eddie._

“What the hell do you think I am trying to do, idiot?” He goes to push himself up with the arm that hasn’t clamped back across his side, but there’s a puddle of something unmentionable that seems to have leaked out of a seam in the metal, and his palm slips out from under him. He hits the ground with his face this time, tasting blood and dumpster-water.

“Ow. Oh god, _ow_.”

He feels a ripple of something that feels like condescending pity from the symbiote—it's a feeling from him that Eddie is very familiar with by now—and it’s apparently enough to rouse Venom to help. Eddie is yanked up, suddenly, away from the disgusting ground, tendrils sliding out of him near his shoulders to catch on the edge of the dumpster and pull. The feeling of Venom lifting him isn’t anything new, but the sudden shift in weight makes the thing inside him move again, and this time it’s a strange rough _rasping_ feeling, harsh against a surface inside him he doesn’t know the name of, and it’s worse than the wet carpet of trash he lands on a second later with a disgusting squelching sound. Eddie curls up on his side, pressing his palm hard against the spot under his ribs like he can stop it happening. He can’t, though, and he just squirms, covering himself in wet garbage.

“It’s chewing on me,” he mumbles into the dark patch of vegetable peelings under his head. The dumpster is only about a third full, and the walls seem high and dark from the inside. “Oh god, I think it’s chewing on me.”

_Heads, Eddie. We must eat._

“It’s _chewing_ on me,” he repeats to his new vegetable-peel companions. “Just gnawing like I’m a teething toy.”

_HEAD EDDIE HEAD I SEE HEAD I SEE_

“I don’t care, V! I can feel its stupid little teeth— _ahhh_.”

_HEAD EDDIE HEAD—_

_—_ and he is yanked backwards, his back hitting the inside wall of the dumpster with a heavy clunking noise that rattles his skull: a tentacle flashes out of one arm, dives under a piece of soggy cardboard to grasp at something tiny and writhing.

It’s a little brown shape, caught in the clutching black goo, and the tentacle pulls back toward Eddie’s face and now there’s something warm and furry between his teeth, against his tongue.

It’s so good. He forgets the awful chewing feeling inside him, forgets everything except his hunger, which rises and then fades as he swallows, the half-chewed head sliding wet down his throat. So, so good.

 _Better_ , Venom says, and it _is_ better, better than the head from the butcher, warm and alive and pulsing with hot blood, and Eddie had thought they’d just eat the head but the tentacle is pushing the rest into his mouth as well and it’s—he can—

—the rat is all gone.

He swallows.

 _Better_ , Venom says again. The tentacle is gone now, too.

“Better,” Eddie agrees, coughing a little, hand moving away from his side for a moment to rub against his stomach. That awful emptiness that has been building up inside is almost gone: he is sore still, but all loose and satisfied as well, like Venom has fucked him again.

He leans his head back against the cold metal behind it. It’s better now. He will be able to see Dan and Anne without worrying about trying to eat parts of them. He will be able to make it until morning, and then they can work on his problem some more.

He moves his hand back to his side, stroking absently, feeling himself breathe as deep as he can, his ribs rising and falling like he's rocking the thing to sleep. The feeling from before has stopped: everything in him feels still now, satisfied. He swallows again: it feels like there’s a little bit of fur caught in his teeth.

“Poor rat,” he says, still stroking at his side. He looks vaguely at the dim little field of trash in front of him: torn garbage bags, spilled food scraps, something unidentifiable that smells like pee.

_What do you mean._

“You know. It might have had rat children to feed.”

_You are deeply stupid, Eddie._

“Might have just been trying to feed its kids, like us.”

_Like us?_

“Yeah,” Eddie mumbles distractedly, still gazing at the trash, and then Venom says _Eddie_ and Eddie feels— _warm_ , suddenly good-warm on the inside. That protective feeling from the symbiote is back, spreading through him like the hunger had. The tentacle is back and wrapping around him, stroking his filthy wet skin, and Eddie hadn’t even needed to ask for it this time.

It’s so nice, and he hears himself moan a little as it wraps around him tighter, as parts of it spread out, stroking over his shoulders, through his hair.

 _Eddie_ , Venom says again. He is practically cooing.

The thing inside him is moving again, just a little, like it’s responding to that external touch, but the feeling is not bad this time. It has started to rain, lightly, and the cool water feels good on his skin as well. His back and face are bruised and his throat hurts and his mouth tastes like rat, but for the first time in all of this awful bullshit he almost feels— _restful_.

It’s okay. It will be okay. Eddie had never picked up the cell phone he’d dropped on the ground before he climbed in here, but once he’s back out he can call Anne, and she and Dan will be able to come help him back up to the apartment, and then Eddie can rest until tomorrow. Maybe, when he’s in bed, Venom will hug him like this again.

He leans his head to one side, and a part of Venom comes out from his shoulder, stroking behind his ear, supporting him like a pillow.

 _Like us_ , _Eddie_ , the symbiote says. Eddie grunts in agreement, closes his eyes.

He sits like that, in the rain, wrapped up in Venom, for longer than he had meant to.

A sudden jerk inside pulls him out of it. Eddie opens his eyes. It’s still raining a little, the water making a soft pattering sound as it hits the upper surfaces of the garbage bags around him. Venom is still coiled around him like a snake, the familiar mineral smell of him almost enough to block out the pee-and-rotten-meat stench of the inside of the dumpster.

He’s been sitting here for so long. The others might be awake.

“V,” he says. “Help me climb out of here.”

The tentacles wrapped around him don’t move. The thing inside him moves instead, stronger.

“Come on, asshole. I just ate a rat for you. Help me out.”

Silence. The thing inside moves again, stronger, and Eddie frowns. “Venom? Hey, V? Venom.”

There’s a few more seconds of quiet in which nothing at all inside him moves, and then it starts.

 

**18.**

 

Every bone in Eddie’s body is trying to separate from his flesh. It’s like being pulled apart by a bone magnet; apparently bone magnets are things that exist, and there's one in this giant trash can. It's like someone is trying to tear apart each of his cells at once, like his _blood_ is trying to separate while it's still in him, like his organs are splitting in two, like—

He screams, loud, arching forward with the pain, and the feeling retracts.

He’s on his stomach now, pressed against wet plastic. The tentacles that had been around him are gone: Venom is back inside him, and Eddie is alone.

He tries to get his breath, gasping. What _was_ that? It hadn't been pain in his side, which is the thing he’d been worried about. It wasn’t in his side, it was _all over him_.

He only gets a few seconds to wonder about it, though: it starts again, hitting him all over all at once. He twists, trying to sit up, and only manages to slam his head into something hard. He’s going to tear apart. It's everywhere, from his head to his neck to his fingertips his knees his dick his stomach—

“Why,” he says. “Oh god, why, why why for the love of god why—”

“Eddie?”

A female voice, from the alley outside the dumpster.

Eddie can barely move to look up, even though the pain is fading again already, can’t see who it’s coming from, and for a moment he thinks he’d imagined it. But there is no way that a version of Anne that his brain made up to comfort him would sound this mad.

“Jesus, Eddie,” she says, “We’ve been looking for you all _over_ , I thought you—”

“Annie,” he calls out. “Annie, I’m dying.”

“Eddie—”

He groans. “God is punishing me, Annie, he’s punishing me because I had sex with an alien and ate a rat that had little baby rats—”

“Eddie, are you fucking—”

That’s as much as he hears, because it starts again, and he really _is_ going to die this time. He is going to split open, every part of him is going to break  _in every direction_ , and now there’s a noise as well, a high agonized noise inside his head like metal scraping on metal.

“V,” he manages to cough out, but the symbiote doesn't reply and he can’t think, and the feeling keeps going, it’s not going to stop this time, and the noise is so loud now that he drags his hands away from his side and claps them over his ears instead.

It all fades again, finally, but he is so sick with the pain that it feels like the garbage is moving under him, and—

A loud squelching sound and—wait, the garbage _is_ moving under him.

He looks up, blinks: Dan is here; Dan has climbed into the dumpster, his weight shifting the layer of wet trash Eddie's lying on.

“Eddie,” he says, crouching down next to him. “Just hold on, buddy, we’re going to get you out of—”

“ _Help_ ,” Eddie says and grabs onto him like he’s drowning, because any second it’s going to start again. “Help, help, _help_ …”

There’s more talking: Dan calls out something that sounds like a polite instruction, but Eddie doesn’t catch Anne’s reply from outside the dumpster because the pain is already back, the _noise_ is already back, screeching inside him, and everything is tearing through him like fire.

Far away, up above him, Dan is pushing him onto his back. “It’s okay, Eddie. Stay still like this if it’s all you can do. Don’t worry, we’re going to figure out what…”

Eddie tries to focus and listen, but it’s worse now, and it doesn’t end. The noise in his head is so loud. He can see Dan up above him in the dim light from the streetlights, and as the pain in him rises he locks eyes with him, desperate.

Dan’s hands are on his shoulders, holding him down, and Eddie screams and screams and it’s so _loud_  in his head and then there is another noise, a wet, fleshy ripping sound from near his abdomen, and what is worst about it is that Dan’s eyes widen like _he hears it too_.

Silence, quiet in his head and outside it. The pain all through his body has stopped, leaving sweat and heat and shaking. The noise in his head has stopped. The lack of pain is like air after choking: he gasps as deep as he can. Above him, Dan is looking down at Eddie's abdomen, and Eddie lifts his head a little and looks down as well.

His stomach looks normal.

Nothing has happened. The thing still inside him.

He catches Dan’s confused frown, even in this light. He says something else, hands still firm on his shoulders, but Eddie doesn’t hear. He doesn’t know where Anne is. He can’t see her.

“V,” he coughs out. “V, what the hell just happened?”

No answer. Instead, there’s just a little flutter of movement inside him.

“Venom?”

Nothing. Not even a _tired_.

Eddie coughs again. His throat feels heavy, torn up from the screaming. He wants to cry. It’s so quiet inside his head. It’s so quiet.

There's movement under his ribs again, stronger now, insistent. Pushing outward, hard like fingers jabbing outward against the inside of his skin, and then—

“No,” Eddie says, hand pressed at his side, squirming. “Oh noooooo. _No._ ”

“Eddie,” Dan says above him. He is not even trying to hide the expression on his face.

“No,” Eddie says again. His free hand is grabbing at Dan’s forearm, his fingers digging into the skin, holding on even through the shivering. “No no no no no—”

“Anne,” Dan calls out, and there’s footsteps outside the dumpster like she’s approaching quickly from further down the alley.

“Yeah?” she says, and the worst part of this is how upset _she_ sounds too.

“Anne,” Dan says, “I think this is going to happen right here.”

 

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is the long-awaited chapter of trash confinement. Thank you for all of the kind comments, and for waiting patiently 

**19.**

 

Eddie hears noises around him: banging on the outside of the dumpster, then a soft thud. Shuffling sounds as the garbage shifts under him with the new weight. Anne is there, crowding up near the metal wall of the dumpster right next to Eddie’s head. Dan moves back a little to give her room. She shoves a wet, bulging plastic bag out of the way, puts a hand on Eddie’s bare shoulder.

“Annie,” he groans, looks up at her helplessly. It’s still raining, and everything is fuzzy with the damp and with the pain. “Annie. _Ow_ , Annie, I can feel it…”

He trails off, because it hurts too much and because he doesn’t have words for it anyway. The thing is moving inside him in a new way now, the whole bulk of it pushing forward against the skin below his ribs, like it’s testing for ways to get out. It feels like a whole chunk of his insides is being rearranged by a surgeon who never finished medical school and who is suffering from serious anger problems. Eddie squirms against his bed of garbage as he’s hit with a particularly strong internal jab.

It’s happening, just like Dan had said. It’s happening, right when Venom has stopped talking to him. He wants to cry. He wants to hide and bury himself under this garbage. He wants the pushing to stop.

Anne moves her hand to take Eddie’s own: her skin feels dry and clean, comforting when he’s sweaty and rainy and covered with bin-juice. She says something in a steady tone, but he can’t hear her over all the noise he’s making. “V has gone quiet, Annie, he’s not talking anymore—”

“Eddie,” Dan says, leaning over closer. “Your friend in there is probably just exhausted. This is difficult for both of you.”

He is right about that, at least. Eddie manages to nod.

Dan squeezes his arm, then quickly turns away. That expensive-looking black bag is next to him now, resting on top of a piece of soggy cardboard. Anne must have gone back up to the apartment to get it. Dan starts to unzip the bag, and Eddie whimpers, groaning louder. But Dan just retrieves a small LED flashlight, which he switches on and hands to Anne.

Eddie would sigh with relief if he didn’t currently feel like his body was trying to turn itself inside out. Anne directs the beam to point at Eddie’s bare stomach, just in time to see the thing in there give a particularly strong push, distending the skin below his ribs.

“It’s okay, Eddie,” Dan says loudly, in a way that sounds like he doesn’t think it’s okay at all, and Eddie groans again, closing his eyes. He feels nauseous, crampy, _wrong_ inside; it _hurts_. He doesn’t want to hurt Anne’s hand, so he clenches his other fist down on a handful of garbage instead. It feels like he’s swallowed a small live octopus that’s trying to find a way back home to the ocean through his skin.

“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly,” he mumbles. “She dies at the end, Annie! The old lady _dies in that song!”_

“It’s okay, Eddie,” Dan says again, and Anne squeezes his hand, firmly enough that it seems to be as much a warning as an act of comfort.

“You’re _not_ going to die,” she says. “Venom is going to help you, Eddie. He said you would be fine and that no one would get hurt. Didn’t you, Venom?”

Venom doesn’t answer. Instead, Eddie just feels _teeth_.

They’re pressing out against his skin from the inside, and when Eddie opens his eyes and lifts his head to look down, he can see the individual raised bumps that they’re forming on his skin, like fingers pushing through thin pizza dough.

The beam of the flashlight wavers.

“Holy shit,” Anne says above him, and Dan looks up at her with the closest thing to a glare Eddie has ever seen on his face.

“It’s okay, buddy,” he says firmly, looking down at Eddie again. “We’re all here for you, all right?”

Eddie tries to nod again. He feels Dan’s hand on his wrist, like he’s taking his pulse, feels him gently brush his fingertips over the raised area on his stomach. It’s happening. It’s happening…

…but then the pushing feeling recedes, suddenly, like the thing has shoved itself as far forward as it can for now. Eddie is left sweaty and shaking, his heartbeat loud in his ears. The rest of the dumpster is quiet, except for the soft sound of the rain.

“You okay, buddy?” Dan is leaning over him again.

“It’s regrouping,” Eddie says weakly. He drops his head back against the garbage, releases his grasp on the handful of trash he’d been holding. Looking down at that hand now, it appears that the handful had consisted of a cardboard container full of old takeout food, and a few strands of noodles are still stuck to his palm. At least he hopes they're noodles. He wipes them off as best as he can on another part of the garbage pile. Lifting his head to look down at himself again, he can see that all that pushing had achieved something: that area under his ribs is still swollen, bulging outward slightly, like the thing is curled up just under the skin.

He breathes in, and finds that he can do it deeply now: the new position is apparently easier on his lungs. He takes a deep breath, then another: it feels wonderful, even if the air smells like mildew and used diapers.

And yet the teeth don’t seem to have been able to make it any further than they had in the bath yesterday. It's like this thing can’t break through yet, even though it’s ready to.

It’s going to try again. It’s going to start pushing and hurting again, he knows this, but what if—

 _It depends on which direction it decides to go_ , Dan had said, when he didn’t know Eddie could hear.

“Do you think—” Eddie says now. He swallows: his mouth still tastes of rat, and his throat hurts. “Do you think it might try to—go another way, if it can’t get out through the front? Would that be bad?”

“Um,” says Dan. His eyes are still on Eddie’s abdomen. “There are some important organs around that it’s better if it avoids, yes. It’s sitting not far from your liver. Your pancreas is pretty close as well, and your bowel, and—”

“My bowel? What the hell is my bowel doing up under my ribs? Did Venom put it there?”

Dan squeezes his arm again. “It seems to be trying to come out the right way, Eddie.”

“But if it doesn’t…”

In the light of the flashlight, he can see that Dan’s eyes move over to the black bag. 

Eddie swallows again. A scalpel is bad, but the other options are worse than even that, which until tonight he didn’t even know was possible. But it’s better to be slashed open than to have symbiote fetus tunnel its way through his organs like it’s trying to escape from prison.

“Okay,” he says up at Dan. His voice comes out quiet. “You can do it if you need to. I trust you.”

“Good,” Dan says, and gives him a tight smile. “That okay with you too, Venom?”

There is no answer, but Eddie nods anyway. Venom trusts Dan too now, even if he’s not talking. Eddie knows that.

“Don’t worry, Eddie,” Anne says from near his head. “If you scream, and anyone comes and asks what we’re doing in here, I’ll use my lawyer voice.”

He nods. He wants to say that he loves her, even though Dan is there, because he is about to get sliced open like a sandwich bun and he doesn’t care anymore. But the thing inside him chooses that moment to wake up and start pushing again, so instead what comes out is a surprised, undignified squeaking noise, like a mouse that’s just been stepped on.

The feeling is worse this time, punching forward inside him with no build-up or time to prepare. Eddie squirms, the garbage under him rustling and squelching as he twists against it. He tries not to scream. They’re outside. He can’t scream. He can’t. But it hurts, it _hurts_.

“You’re all right, Eddie.” Dan’s voice, over his own. “Let’s just see—”

“It’s _not_ all right,” says Anne, cutting him off. “Jesus Christ, Venom, _do_ something. Help him! Get it out of him already! Can’t you see how much this is hurting him?”

No answer. Eddie must be hurting her hand now with how he’s gripping it. He can’t help it. It’s going to kill him.

“Venom,” Anne snaps, louder. “ _Get your fucking act together_ and help him!”

Nothing: Eddie hears only the sounds still coming of his own mouth.

“Anne,” Dan says, and then he is saying something else, but by then Eddie is not listening anymore.

Venom _always_ responds to Anne when she talks to him like that. Venom is terrified of Anne. Venom would not ignore her. He would react to Anne, even a little bit, if he had _any_ way of doing so.

But the symbiote has not responded. And Eddie can’t pick up anything else from him either, not fear or intimidation, not anything. 

Something is _wrong_ , wronger even than the pain, wronger than his insides being used as an alien punching bag. It is so _quiet_ inside his head. Venom has been so weak, so tired since all of this started. And that noise, the noise that Dan had heard too—it had sounded like something inside him _ripping apart_ —

“Eddie,” Dan is saying somewhere above him. “Eddie, hold still, we want it to stay at the front. You don’t want to confuse it, remember?”

But he can’t. He can’t hold still. He can’t do anything now, because it suddenly seems perfectly, nauseously clear to him that Venom must be dead.

And it’s too much, everything is too much. He can’t be _alone_ like this, he can’t be—

“Eddie,” Anne is saying.

“No,” Eddie says. He is trying to sit up. He needs to move. “No, no. I don’t want it anymore.”

“Hold still,” Dan says, “Eddie, _please_ , we are trying to stop it from—”

“I don’t _want_ it. I don’t want this thing anymore. I said I was okay with it but I just want V back, I want—”

“Eddie. _Eddie!_ ”

He slumps down and stops moving, finally, not because he has been convinced but because of a sudden new, contorted sensation that goes through him. Something is _twisting_ in there, and Dan says something else close to him, louder, concerned.

Eddie looks down, wetness spilling out of his eyes at the motion. He can’t see that little lump under his ribs anymore. It's going to go another way.

Dan is, somehow, already moving. Before he even has time to think Eddie hears a zipper, movement, the crinkling sound of a plastic wrapper. Something cool and liquid is poured over his abdomen, and only moment after that there is a heavy weight on his legs, the layers of garbage settling underneath. Dan is sitting on his legs, leaning forward a little to access his abdomen. Plastic gloves on his hands already, and he is holding a scalpel blade that is bright with reflected light.

It has all happened so fast, and Eddie should be scared, both of the scalpel and the movement inside him, but instead he just feels—blank. Fuzzy, like he sometimes gets when Venom is inside him, restricting his air. Like nothing else around him matters. The pain doesn’t matter anymore, and neither does that little case of surgical instruments. It’s like he is floating. It’s happening, and he’s here, and it doesn’t matter. Venom is gone.

“Okay, Eddie.” Dan takes a deep breath, then exhales. “Try to hold still, all right, buddy?”

Then he starts without waiting for a reply.

The blade in his hand flashes silver as it dips down. Anne, up near his head, grips his hand tight.

The antiseptic Dan had poured on his abdomen before is brown in color, and it makes the blood hard to see when the blade digs into the skin. Eddie watches, twitching only slightly. It’s going to keep going. It’s going to get so much worse.

But then Dan stops the cut, and Eddie gasps.

The thing inside him has lurched forward, pushing out against Eddie’s skin again with renewed energy, as if Eddie’s skin being sliced had grabbed its attention. Dan pulls the scalpel back from his skin like he’s giving the thing room, and then the two rows of _teeth_ are pressed up against Eddie’s skin again, but this time—

This time—

They keep going.

Shoving and pushing with new vigor, gaining coordination and _biting_ , and Eddie grits his teeth and yells as the two rows of teeth finally move together and then  _crunch_. Blood spills out and down his side as the thing tears through, spilling up and outwards like oil oozing out of the ground. Eddie wails, twisting against the wet garbage below him, pinned under the weight on his legs. Dan is still there, still holding the scalpel.

The next part happens quickly.

All Eddie sees is an upwards flash of black, a row of tiny teeth, as small as sharpened pearls and bright white in the glow of the flashlight. There’s a metallic clinking sound, and then, suddenly, the scalpel blade is gone from Dan’s hand.

It is still raining, lightly. The water glistens on the surface of the little black lump that’s now resting again on Eddie’s bloodied stomach.

“What the everloving _fuck_ ,” Anne says from near Eddie’s head.

“Uh,” says Dan.

Anne says: “Did it just eat your scalpel?”

“Uh,” Dan says again. He is still holding the plastic handle that had been attached to the blade, but the metal is entirely gone. The little black thing moves now, pulling the last of itself out of the short tear that its teeth had made in Eddie’s skin. Eddie moans.

“ _It ate your fucking scalpel_ ,” Anne says. 

“It, uh, it seems to be okay, though?” Dan says. “The baby is okay, Eddie.”

Eddie’s neck is sore from raising his head to look at it for so long, but he keeps doing it. The new baby symbiote is black and shiny in the light, reflected red with the streaks of blood still on it, little droplets of the blood washing off in the rain and sliding pale red down Eddie's stomach. It’s small: it looks, more than anything else, like a lump of Play-doh that someone has dyed jet-black and then squashed into a little mound. As he watches, it moves again: it flops forward across his skin, up in the direction of his chest. The movement reveals an uneven line of teeth, like tiny sharp pebbles.

“Okay, Eddie.” Dan stops to clear his throat. “Okay. Um. We need to bandage you up and then get you two somewhere better than—”

He trails off. The thing’s still moving.

It flops up toward Eddie's collarbone, resting there just underneath it. The teeth move across it again, still uneven, like it’s forgotten again how to coordinate them properly. Finally they’re lined up in a loose row parallel to the surface of Eddie’s skin, and then that row of teeth dips forward, sinking in.

Eddie sucks in a breath. The bite is sharp, but not particularly deep, like being gnawed on by a kitten. Those tiny curved teeth stay fastened in his skin, and the whole lump flattens slightly and settles down in that position, latching on contentedly, like it’s nursing.

“Oh god,” Eddie says down at it, his voice hoarse in the new quiet of the dumpster. “Oh, god.”

The inside of his head is still silent.

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate everyone's patience :) More coming soon.

**20.**

 

Out in the living room, out of sight, Dan and Anne are talking about him.

They’re speaking softly: they think Eddie is asleep, that the pills Dan had given him for the pain were also enough to let him rest. As if anything would be able to knock him out right now.

It’s still dark in the apartment. There’s a towel under him, covering the worst of the dirty sheets, left over from after they had both helped clean him off in the bathroom. Someone had also helped him into boxers at some point, and then pulled a thin sheet up to cover the rest of him. And the thing—the little lump of black goo—the _baby_ , he has to call it—is curled up against his bare skin, right under his collarbone. It hasn’t moved much in a while, although Eddie can feel an occasional rippling motion under his fingers, as if it’s adjusting itself while it sleeps.

Eddie lies still, staring up at the dark corner between the wall next to the bed and the ceiling. The building is so quiet this early in the morning, and the inside of his head is still so quiet, too.

“This is ridiculous,” Anne is saying from the couch, in that low tone she always uses when she's angry. “You’re a doctor, you know this is ridiculous.”

“I agree with what Eddie told me,” Dan says, and he doesn’t sound angry at all. “It’s not safe for the symbiote baby in a hospital. And if Venom is alive, it won’t be safe for him either.”

“If Venom is alive, he could be eating him from the inside again.”

“Eddie’s my patient, honey.” His tone remains perfectly friendly. “And he made his choice clear.”

Annie makes an annoyed noise, but doesn’t argue. The disagreement just fades out like that, peaceful, in a way that disagreements absolutely _never_ had when she and Eddie had been together. After a moment, there is a slight shifting noise: Eddie doesn’t move his head to try to see, but it sounds like Dan is hugging her.

“I’m so tired,” Anne says, voice muffled like she is being held. “I’m exhausted.”

Eddie exhales, fingers moving a little and pressing into the smooth surface of the symbiote-lump on his chest. The bedsheet feels suddenly heavy on his bare body, painful against the gauze covering his side.

“You need rest,” Dan says from the couch.

“Yes, I do, and then what if I sleep and that thing escapes and tries to—”

“It hasn’t left Eddie’s side. It’s attached to him most of the time, honey.”

“Venom was attached to me when he made me eat a _head_ ,” she says, and Eddie tenses up a little under the sheets, frowning.

“You think that tiny thing would eat someone’s head?”

“I think it could definitely bite off a fingertip,” she says. “Or worse, it could—”

Her voice cuts off, as if Dan has gestured for her to stop speaking. He must suspect that Eddie is awake.

“Let me just go check on him,” he says. “It’s been a while.”

The leather couch creaks like they are pulling away from each other, and Eddie closes his eyes. He hears Dan approach the bed and then turn on the lamp on the bedside table. The sudden light is harsh even behind Eddie’s eyelids, but he keeps his face neutral and his breathing slow, like he’s relaxed and having a beautiful dream about a beach.

“Eddie?” Dan says. “You awake? I just want to have a quick look at your side, buddy.”

Eddie pretends not to hear. Anne’s words are still in his head, echoing through his not-at-all-beach-related thoughts. Why is she so worried about the baby already? Does she know something he doesn’t? Is _he_ supposed to be worried about what the baby might do?

He tries to keep still, not let his face twitch. He doesn’t understand any of this, and no one can help him, because Venom is either purposefully silent, or injured, or dead.

Just thinking that is like someone punching him in the throat. He can’t think about it, not directly. It’s too much.

Cool air on his skin as Dan eases down the sheet that’s covering his torso, and the baby symbiote shifts like it feels the temperature change, remolding itself against Eddie’s collarbone like a slowly melting lump of plastic. There’s the noise of Dan digging around in the bag he’d left close by. Eddie opens his eyes a little and sees him kneel down next to the bed and lean forward, and then he gently starts to unstick the tape that’s holding down the patch of gauze on Eddie’s side. He’s put on a pair of gloves, but that seems to have been done in the interests of hygiene rather than out of a desire to keep his fingertips: he makes no attempt to keep his hands or arms away from the baby.

Still, Eddie keeps a hold on it.

More cool air on the wound now, and Eddie smells blood and something like salt. Dan hadn’t stitched up the cut on Eddie’s abdomen after he cleaned it out: he’d said something about how stitches would make things worse if it got infected. Instead, there had been a long nightmare session of Dan pushing damp strips of gauze into the wound with something that looked like a q-tip, while Anne kept telling Eddie that if he kept screaming so loud someone was going to call the cops. The baby had squirmed a little, but hadn’t bitten Dan, even during that extremely unpleasant experience. Surely it would have panicked and eaten someone then, if it was going to?

“This is looking really good, Eddie,” Dan says now, pressing the tape back down against Eddie’s skin. Eddie quickly closes his eyes again. “You’re doing just great.”

Eddie keeps silent, still trying to keep up his increasingly dubious _I am asleep_ lie.

“I’m just going to take your temperature now,” Dan goes on. “I’ll put the thermometer under your arm again, all right? It might feel a little cold.”

Eddie nods against the pillow, because it’s clear by now that Dan has known from the start that Eddie was never asleep, and that he’s just been trying to avoid embarrassment for both of them by pretending not to notice. Eddie really hopes the baby doesn’t eat him.

He holds still as Dan gets even closer to the baby to position the thermometer. He smells like clean clothes and Eddie’s own shower soap, and only very slightly of garbage. Eddie holds the baby a little tighter, but it doesn’t move.

“No fever,” Dan says. “This is very good, Eddie.”

“I gave birth in a dumpster,” Eddie mumbles.

“You did, and now there’s no infection, and the wound—it all looks good. I don’t want to give you too much hope, Eddie, but maybe this means your pal is still in there, and he’s helping you.”

Eddie nods again, his eyes still closed. It _doesn’t_ give him much hope. Dan doesn't know just how silent it is in his head. Maybe he has forgotten that ripping noise before Venom went quiet. Maybe he hadn’t heard it in the same way Eddie had.

A creaking sound from the wooden floor as Dan stands up. He takes off his gloves, and then he leans down and touches Eddie on the top of the head, briefly, fingers in his hair. The lamp clicks off, and the red-dark behind Eddie’s eyelids turns to black-dark.

He tries not to listen as Dan goes back over to Anne on the couch. Instead, he strokes the top of the little lump curled against him, gently, with his index finger. It flutters a little under his touch. After a few seconds, a stray tooth emerges, scraping over the pad of his finger. Eddie huddles closer around it, ducking his head down further and breathing in. The baby has its own smell, stronger than the way Venom had smelled when he was still with him. It’s like the air around hot metal.

He is so tired. His head is heavy with drowsiness from the pills and the fatigue, but he can’t fall asleep. Not with the baby right here, not with this silence, not with what Anne had said. There is no way he is sleeping like this.

 

 

**21.**

 

 

“Eddie?”

Eddie wakes up to bright light.

“How you doing, buddy,” Dan is saying. He’s kneeling down beside the bed, blocking out some of the sunlight, and as he speaks he presses the back of his hand briefly against Eddie’s forehead. “It’s after ten. You feel like trying to drink something?”

Eddie half sits up, and then remembers the little goop-child, which has started to slide across his chest with the movement. His hands fly up to grasp it, but it has already stopped sliding. He looks down, blinking: it’s attached to him, little rows of tiny teeth digging firm onto his skin. It must have latched on at some point while he was asleep.

“Oh,” he says out loud. He closes his eyes. He has stopped moving now, but his head feels like it’s still lurching. He feels exhausted, somehow more exhausted than when he fell asleep, and there’s an ache all inside him, down in his belly and all the way up to his chest, like someone has thrown a house party inside his abdominal cavity and invited all their friends.

“You okay, Eddie? How’s our little newcomer doing there?”

He steadies himself against the mattress, keeping one hand on the baby just in case, and opens his eyes again. His mouth is dry. “Where’s Annie?” he says instead of answering either of Dan’s questions.

“She had to go to court again. But I’m going to be here all day, and we’ll make sure you’re both fine, all right?”

“Did I get her into trouble? Are you missing work too?”

“Don’t worry about any of that, bud. You just have to get better now. You look like you need some liquids in you.”

He looks down at the little symbiote, which is still sitting on his chest like a clump of melted blacktop. “Do you think it’s, like… drinking something?”

There’s a slight flash of concern on Dan's face behind the cheeriness, and for a second he acts like he is going to reach out and examine the thing. But then he just smiles. “Let’s just get you some water and go from there.”

Eddie sits up further on the bed, still with one hand supporting the baby. He manages to balance as he takes the glass of water Dan hands him. Drinking hurts. Everything hurts, and everything is just as awful as it was in the dark last night. He needs to pee, and then maybe he can fit in a quick weeping-alone-in-the-bathroom session before his day really starts.

“I need the bathroom,” he says when he is done with the glass, and when Dan moves to help he adds: “I can get there. It’s okay.”

This, incredibly, turns out to be true. It hurts and he’s slow and Dan hovers nearby until Eddie is behind the door, but he gets there, and he's alone. 

He successfully stays upright long enough to use the bathroom, and then gets to the sink in the other room and grasps onto its edge with one hand, stopping to catch his breath. On his chest, the baby makes a little noise, teeth shifting and clicking like it’s adjusting its own grip. Now he's here with it, crying alone in the bathroom does not seem as easy. It's like someone else in the room watching you pee. 

“Can I put you down?” Eddie asks. His voice is still croaky despite the water. He wraps his hand around the goo, gently tries to detach it.

Surprisingly, it works. The teeth detach from his flesh, furling back up into its body as Eddie lifts it, holding it up high in front of his face to look at it more closely in the daylight. There’s no face visible: it just hangs in his hands like a lump of shiny black slime, making the tiniest rippling movements as it settles and adjusts. This close, it’s impossible not to notice just how much it smells like blood.

He peers up at it. “What are you, exactly?” he whispers.

Nothing except another tiny gloopy movement. Eddie moves it down carefully until it’s resting on the back edge of the sink, next to the tap and the little plastic cup where he keeps his toothbrush and comb and razor. The new surface seems to wake it up a little: as Eddie watches, the two rows of little teeth emerge again, and it drags them over the white ceramic surface of the sink like it’s testing it for weakness.

“Is Anne right about you?” he says, but the baby ignores him, just keeps gnawing at the ceramic. It seems to be getting better at arranging its teeth properly in straight lines: they’re almost all even now, and all curving in the same direction.

But it’s happy there, apparently, and Eddie is alone, so he takes the opportunity to cautiously touch his side, over the gauze. He doesn’t have to check it like Dan had done to feel that the wound is definitely still there and unhealed. He’s never been bitten open from the inside in a dumpster before, so he isn’t familiar with the average healing rates, but surely if Venom was alive the wound would be gone by now. Venom would have chewed up that packed gauze and swallowed it like it was salty cotton candy. He would have  healed him up from the inside out. He would have—

There’s a clattering noise from the sink.

Eddie’s attention snaps back: the baby has knocked over the cup, and is in the process of swallowing the fancy stainless-steel razor that Annie had gotten him for his birthday two years ago.

“Wait—” He tries to grab the end of the razor, but the symbiote clamps down on it with those two little teeth-rows, crunching down so that the handle breaks off in his hand. “Oh, come on! That was a _present_!”

The baby ignores him: it flops upwards onto the wall above the sink, like its razor snack has energized it. Eddie drops the broken handle and reaches for it, in the process forgetting that he has a fresh wound on his side and that his painkillers from last night have worn off. He stops, yelping in pain and clutching his side, and watches helplessly as the baby climbs up the side of the cabinet on the bathroom wall, out of reach.

A knock on the door. “Eddie?” Dan calls from outside. “You okay in there?”

“I’m fine,” Eddie calls back weakly. Then he drops his voice and hisses: “Get down. Get down here!”

The symbiote ignores him. It’s up at the top of the cabinet now, wrapped around the narrow upper ledge.

“Come down here or you’re not getting any more food!”

No reaction. It just twitches a bit, its grip on the upper ledge rippling and squeezing.

Eddie grits his teeth. “Get—down—here— _right—now_.”

The baby doesn’t. It flattens itself out more now until it’s almost puddle shaped. Little ripples are going through it, like it is trembling.

“Jesus,” Eddie says up to it. “You... can’t get down at all, can you?”

It stays still, still clutching at the edge.

Eddie exhales. If he calls for help after being alone with this thing for three minutes, Dan won’t trust him alone with it again, and that is going to seriously cut into his future crying-alone-in-the-bathroom plans. He takes a deep breath to prepare himself, and then steps as close as he can to the edge of the sink, reaches up with his left arm. Even _that_ hurts; he’s so bruised all over inside. Still, he extends his arm until his hand is almost level with the top edge of the cabinet. “Come on,” he says, quieter now. “Jump into my hand, I’ve got you.”

The baby symbiote hesitates for a moment, and then slips forward, flopping itself down into his waiting hand. Eddie grabs it and pulls it to his chest, steadying himself against the wall with his other hand. It nudges up against his skin, and then there’s the brush of those little teeth and a faint, pinching pain. It’s attached again, clamped onto him tight, rising and falling with his breathing.

“I got you,” he says, and it presses even closer against him. He strokes its back.

This thing is not going to run away and eat fingertips. It is—

_—helpless_.

“Venom,” he says softly, looking down at the baby as it flattens itself further, pressed out like thick tar against his skin. “V, I am… really bad at this. Come back.”

Silence. The baby is still holding tight to his chest. Eddie’s throat hurts suddenly.

“V, come on, you left me with this little thing. What if it gets hurt? It’s gonna get _hurt_ , V, it just ate my razor and _I have no idea if that’s good or not._ ”

Nothing. A new, deeper heaviness in his chest that has nothing to do with the pain from those tiny teeth. The baby moves with his uneven breathing. Eddie wipes his eyes with his feee hand.

“ _Asshole_ ,” he says. “Fine. Ignore me. Leave me, then. I don’t care. Fucking asshole. They never should have scraped you off of a comet.”

The baby moves then, teeth rearranging before they dig in again, and Eddie goes to support it with his other hand as well, and as he moves to do it he suddenly thinks he hears—

He freezes, but the noise in his head is so weak, gone almost before it’s there. Everything around him is quiet: there’s just the sound of faint traffic outside, and the neighbor upstairs listening to Korean rap music.

“Venom?” Eddie says. “Are you there? Did you say something?"

Still nothing. The baby moves again, squirming a little and then drawing itself up into a thicker lump against his skin, and Eddie wonders if he’d upset it.

“V?” he asks again. “Can you talk? I’m sorry I said they shouldn’t have scraped you off a comet.”

Silence. The presence in his head had come and gone so quickly that he'd hardly had time to feel anything. His heartbeat is fast against where the tiny symbiote is lying.

“Our baby is here,” he says, quietly, to the empty bathroom.

He strains his ears and waits, but he hears nothing but the steady sounds of Korean rap.

 

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for all the nice comments, I read and appreciate every one of them even if I am too much of a goober to reply <3

 

**22.**

 

Dan insists on stripping the sheets off of Eddie’s bed, and tells him he is going to take them down to the laundry room in the basement.

“There’s a baby here, buddy,” he says as he leads Eddie over the couch in the main room. “Babies need a nice clean environment.”

He gives him some water, and a new round of pain pills, and puts a blanket over him, and after all that the couch cushions are almost as comfortable as the bed had been. But the silence in his head is still there, pounding against the inside of his head like bad music. He feels it even when he drifts off to sleep, his skin sweaty against the leather and his mouth dry and the symbiote curled up into a little lump on his chest under the blanket.

Someone knocks on the door sometime in the early afternoon, and sometime after that Dan appears next to him with a paper delivery bag and a cardboard drink carrier, which he sets down on the floor next to the couch.

“You need help sitting up?” Dan asks. “Do you think you can handle a sandwich, or do you just want to start with a drink?”

“A drink is enough,” Eddie manages through his dry throat. He pushes himself up on one elbow, even though the sudden motion makes him feel nauseous. He doesn’t want Dan to feel like he has to get too close to the baby if he doesn’t want to. Eddie no longer thinks the little symbiote might be dangerous, but Dan might still be scared of it, just like Anne was. He might just be too nice to say it out loud.

The blanket sliding down off his chest makes the little lump stir, and it pushes itself closer against Eddie’s skin, melting against him like a little black slime-puddle. Eddie steadies it there with the hand that isn’t supporting his own weight, and as he does it he looks upwards and catches sight of Dan’s expression.

Dan is looking down at the symbiote. He still has that neutral, _don’t-worry-I-am-a-doctor_ expression he’s always wearing around Eddie these days, but he doesn’t look scared. He looks _fascinated_.

Eddie glances down at the thing pressed against him, then back up at Dan. “Do you want—I mean, if it doesn’t mind…I don’t think it bites. I mean, it clearly _does_ bite, but I don’t think it eats fingertips or anything. I mean—it’s not bad. I don’t think it’s bad.”

“I’d be happy to try to hold the baby while you drink your smoothie, Eddie, if that’s what you’re offering,” Dan says.

Eddie nods, goes to pull the symbiote off his chest, but stops when he sees that it’s still clinging to him, stuck there tight against his skin like a starfish on a rock. People let other people hold their babies all the time, don’t they? But this is different. Maybe it’s scared.

“I won’t force it,” Dan says. “Here, I’ll just…”

He kneels down onto the floor beside the couch, and then he just moves his hand forward, slowly, until it’s close to Eddie’s chest but not actually touching the symbiote. Then he pushes the side side of the hand, palm up, very gently right up the edge of it, like you would when encouraging a bug to crawl on a piece of paper so you can take it outside.

They wait. The apartment air is cool on Eddie’s bare skin now that he doesn’t have his blanket anymore. The little goo-pile doesn't move. Dan looks up, smiles at Eddie with an _oh well_ expression.

But then suddenly it shifts, flowing sideways onto Dan’s hand like ferrofluid being pulled in by a magnet. It stops when it’s on his palm, resting there and pushing out a few tiny stumpy tendrils like it’s exploring. Dan gradually moves his other hand toward it too, strokes its shiny back with two fingers. The symbiote ripples like it enjoys that, little lumps forming and pushing upwards like it’s trying to press back into the touch. The rest of it spreads out a little more, wrapping itself around Dan’s hand and curling around his fingers.

It isn’t scared at all. It likes him.

Eddie watches, the skin on his chest where the goo had been stuck to him still too-hot and sweaty. Dan keeps stroking, but he's also lifting it slightly, looks closer and probes slightly with his fingers, like he’s doing the same quick, semi-stealthy doctor-examination he had done on Eddie before. The symbiote responds to the firmer touch by pushing out a row of tiny white teeth, but it doesn’t bite him, just uses them to press back against Dan’s fingers. Dan repositions his hand so it can chew on the end of one thumb, and keeps stroking it with his index and middle fingers.

“What’s your name, little buddy?” he says, softly. “You’re a friendly little thing, aren’t you? You still feeling hungry?”

“It ate my razor,” Eddie says. “In the bathroom.”

“Is it iron you want, then?” Dan says to it. “You want us to buy you a little cast-iron frying pan you can chew on?” He looks up at Eddie. "Was it a stainless steel one?"

“Yes.”

“I think I know the type,” Dan says, looking back at the goo on his hand now. “Anne got it for you?”

“Yeah, she did.”

“She got me one as well.”

“Oh,” Eddie says, “that’s good.”

And then there is an awkward silence, and Eddie considers whether he should just pull the blanket back over his head and pretend to have suddenly turned invisible. But then there's another knock on the door.

“That must be the frozen animal heads we ordered yesterday,” Dan says, and he sets the baby gently back into Eddie’s hand and stands up.

“Bless you, frozen animal heads,” Eddie whispers to himself as Dan goes to open the door. In his hand, the symbiote slumps down like it’s disappointed.

“Don’t tell me _you_ like him better as well,” Eddie whispers to it. He presses the baby back against the bare skin on his chest. Its teeth are still out, and it latches on quickly, right on top of one of the old marks it had made on his skin. It’s tender, even through the haze of the pain pills, and he hisses. Those little teeth sink in deeper, pinching, like the symbiote is still mad at him for ruining his fun with the other human.

He glances up: Dan has stepped out into the hallway to talk to whoever is at the door, probably to prevent whoever it is from seeing the mostly-naked guy on the couch holding the tiny alien, so it's okay to keep speaking. “Little asshole baby,” Eddie says. "Stupid slime monster like your dad."

In response it just bites him some more, and Eddie holds it there, and tries stroking it with his fingertip, like Dan had done. That works: it ripples in closer toward him, little tendrils nudging upwards against his fingertips as the teeth stay clamped to his skin. It's getting better with its teeth, the bite firm and sealed enough now for him to feel the slight sucking pressure there.

“You like liquids,” Eddie says softly. “I bet we could make you up a nice smoothie or something like Dan got for me, with whatever you need in it. But you also just like cuddling, don’t you?”

The thing ripples again.

“I’ll try my best,” Eddie whispers down to it.

Across the room, Dan steps back into the apartment and closes the door behind him. He’s holding an unusually large cardboard box. “I told them we didn’t need this stuff anymore, but they’re not very good about returning frozen animal heads,” he says. “I’ll just put it all in the fridge, all right? Unless you think the baby wants to try a piece.”

“I think it’s happy with this,” Eddie says, and the goo on his chest bites down harder in response.

He doesn’t mind, though; he just strokes it again. It’s clearly over its disappointment now, and that is nice. Painful on his skin, but nice.

It stays attached to him like that while Eddie drinks his smoothie, and by the time he’s done most of the nausea is gone and he feels… okay. There’s a short but unpleasant experience involving Dan changing the dressings on his side, but Eddie holds still and the baby doesn't freak out, and it’s okay. It's alive, and safe, and Eddie can drift off back to sleep now. The silence isn’t quite as awful.

Everything is an almost-pleasant blur after that: Dan helping him to the bathroom, Dan going down to put the sheets in the dryer, Dan checking his side and giving him another pill. The baby shifting and exploring, crawling up onto Eddie's shoulder and sliding down across his stomach like it's curious about the gauze there, but never leaving him fully.

Anne must arrive at some point in the late afternoon, because when he wakes up again she's standing in front of him.

“Come on, we have nice clean sheets for you," she says. "It'll be better for your side than spending the night on a couch. Stand up and try not to faint on me.”

He does it, grasping at the goo that has reattached to his chest, and looks around. Some of the lights are still on, but it's dark outside, and rain is streaking the windows that look out onto the street. The apartment looks empty.

“Dan’s in the shower," she says. "I think it takes a couple of washes to completely get the dumpster smell out of human skin, speaking from experience. Luckily the other lawyer I worked with today also smelled pretty bad, so I don’t think anyone noticed me too much. Here, aren't these nice?” They’ve reached his bed, which has indeed been made up with the clean sheets and pillowcases, the covers folded back.

Eddie nods as Anne helps him sit down. Maybe it _is_ nice. The sheets had smelled like sweat and blood and worse from when Venom had fucked him, and from when he’d been injured back when Venom was still alive. Now they smell like—nothing. That should hurt, but it doesn’t, and maybe that means that everything is okay.

He lies back, head against the soft pillow, his hands steady on the little lump still curled up on his chest. It shudders a little, and he strokes it. Anne watches him, arms folded, but she looks satisfied. He smiles up at her, then back at the symbiote.

“It’s going to be okay,” he whispers down to it, and then the baby lets go of his skin and rears back and—

 

 

**23.**

 

 

There’s liquid everywhere, pale red and thin and slimy and smelling strongly like blood. All over him, his face and his neck and his chest, all over the pillowcase and the nice clean sheets.

“What the _fuck_ —” he says, and then cuts himself off, because he’d almost ended the sentence with _Venom_ , and Venom isn’t here. He is sitting up, his side screaming from the too-sudden movement, and the symbiote is curled up on the sheet beside him and Eddie is too scared to touch it, too scared he’ll—

“—I’ll hurt it, it’s sick. It’s sick, Annie, help, it’s throwing up, I think it’s dying—”

“Eddie—”

“Get Dan, go get Dan, he was looking at it before, he can—”

“Eddie. Eddie. Calm down. Look at it. It looks _fine_.” She reaches down, scoops the baby up from the sheets, and Eddie’s mind flashes back to what she had said last night and he thinks _oh no, not the_   _fingertips,_ but Anne just holds it, arms extended in front of her a bit so that it's not in reach of her body. “See? Still moving. It’s probably just still getting used to eating! It’s an infant, remember?”

Eddie looks. All he can see is more liquid dripping off of it, red and metallic-smelling.

“I messed up, Annie, I fed it too much or something.”

“So we can just give it a rest from eating. Maybe it’s not good at regulating itself yet. Probably it needs to...”

She is saying something else, but he doesn’t hear. He is breathing deep. His side hurts, his whole torso aching and bruised, his head too light. It’s not okay. He is alone.

“Eddie…”

It’s not okay. The little symbiote just sitting there, being a baby, not realizing its other parent has died and it’s gonna be alone its whole life with a total fuckup who can’t even take care of it without turning it into a tiny black blood-fountain.

He starts to cry.

“Eddie, don’t,” Anne says. She is still holding the symbiote, and she shoves it further toward him, like she wants him to take it back from her. “No, come on. Please don’t do the crying thing.”

Eddie wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and tries to speak. Nothing but sobbing breaths comes out.

Anne glances toward the bathroom door. “We’re not together anymore, Eddie, it’s _weird_.”

“I can’t help it,” he chokes out.

“It’s _weird_ for us to…” she says, but trails off and sighs. She sits down on the edge of the bed, tentatively, avoiding the new puddle. The baby is pulled in against her now. Eddie still doesn’t dare to touch it.

“I can’t do this,” he says, stopping to try to breathe. “I need him, Annie. He’s not talking to me, he’s dying or he’s dead already, I heard it happen in the dumpster. I can’t—”

“You _don’t_ need him,” she says. “You’re doing so great by yourself, Eddie, see how happy it is now?”

It _does_ look happy, tucked into her elbow and calm and still eating absolutely no fingertips. Eddie sniffs and wipes his nose. “But I want him back.”

“I know, Eddie, I know,” she says. She sighs, then leans down to pick up a discarded hand towel from the floor. She uses it to start wiping down the baby, holding it gently in place with her other hand. “Look,” she says. “If Venom _is_ in there, I think it’s better for you to just try to stay calm, and rest as much as you can. That’ll help him to heal, won’t it? If you just focus on getting better?”

He looks at her. Maybe she really believes what she is saying, or maybe she just desperately wants him to stop crying. It's hard to tell with her. But he nods.

“You gonna take this thing back, or you want to wait until I wrap it up in this bloodied towel like a cute little murder swaddle?”

“Sorry,” he says. He reaches for it, and it moves right back into his hands. The towel hadn’t quite gotten all the blood-vomit off of it, and it leaves a little slimy trail as it climbs back up onto his chest, like a snail that has just gotten away with stabbing someone to death.

“I’m sorry, Annie,” he says again. He wipes his eyes. “I am so sorry. I didn’t mean—any of this—”

“Leave it,” she says. “You can make it up to me later when you don’t have a hole in your side and a little lamprey-spawn hugging you.”

“Annie—”

“You need some more goddamn rest, Eddie. We all do.”

He stops talking, just nods mutely. She stands up, then reaches down and pats him on the shoulder. “I’ll go get you another towel for the sheets.”

Eddie’s last clean towel from the bathroom does indeed soak up the worst of the liquid, but the bed still smells like blood.

 

 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience through illnesses and other mishaps, everybody <3 Have a long chapter.

 

**24.**

 

“You know, it would be easier for me to stay calm if you would _talk_ to me,” Eddie whispers to the ceiling once he’s alone and the others are asleep on the couch. “Let me know you’re there. Just once. Venom, please.”

Nothing happens, of course. The inside of his head is quieter than the dark apartment. And there’s no reason it should be different this time, anyway.

The baby is pressed up against his chest, still and calm now, and the skin it’s lying on has gone sweaty. The rest of him feels too cold. Dan had given him another pill earlier, after he’d checked Eddie’s temperature again and had another look at his wound, and when Eddie closes his eyes now the world swims a little, the darkness moving and shifting like he’s underwater. Eddie changes position to get his bearings back, turning onto his side, and the baby stirs.

“Shh,” he says, and hugs it a bit tighter until it squishes down happily against him. A few tiny teeth emerge from the soft goo at its front, pushing against his skin. It doesn’t actually bite down this time, though, just leaves the teeth pressed there for a few seconds before retracting them again. Eddie strokes his fingers gently along its back, ducking his head to breath in its weird metallic smell, and after a minute or two the teeth press in again.

Maybe it’s dreaming about feeding off him. If it _can_ dream. Eddie had never asked Venom if he dreamed.

He raises his head and rearranges himself again against the pillow, trying to get comfortable in his new position without jostling the baby or pulling too hard at his side. Sleeping for most of the day isn’t conductive to resting at night; he’d learned that pretty soon after he got fired. But the pain drugs are enough to let him stop thinking if he tries, and so he tries.

He lies there, eyes still closed, and there’s nothing but dark and the faint sound of cars going by outside and the rain tapping on the windows. The room shifts again, like water, and that burning-metal smell of the baby is there too, and then Eddie is in the water again, after the explosion. Venom is dead—he had thought he was dead—that he had died saving him—

But Venom hadn’t died. Not then.

Eddie sniffs, turns his face down into the pillow so he can wipe his nose and eyes on the pillowcase without disturbing the baby. That plan doesn’t work, because then a sob breaks out of him, his chest jerking upwards. The symbiote squirms, ripples, pokes at him with its teeth, and then bites down on him for real this time.

He winces. “I’m sorry I woke you,” he says, and he wipes his face on the formerly-clean pillowcase again, and then decides to just keep his face pressed into it this time. It seems like the appropriate thing to do right now. There is the wet sound of a heavier vehicle on the street outside, louder steady dripping noises as rain collects somewhere near a window.

He had thought Venom had died for him.

 _Rest as much as you can_ , Anne had said. _That will help him to heal._

But maybe Eddie can do even better.

“V,” Eddie whispers into the damp pillow. “I have a plan. Let me know you’re there, and I’ll tell it to you, that's the deal.”

Nothing. The baby twitches a bit against his chest, teeth digging in deeper like little pinching needles. It seems annoyed, maybe because it wants him to stop talking so it can rest again, or maybe because even it thinks Eddie is stupid.

“Come on,” he continues. “I know I heard you before. In my head, when we were in the bathroom. I know I did.”

He stops, and waits, and there’s no reason it should be different than it was ten minutes ago.

“I’ll, um, assume you’re trying your best, so I’ll tell you anyway,” he says. “You were eating my organs right after we met, right? And you could do that again if you wanted to? Would that make you get better?”

He stops again. The baby seems to bite down on him harder, like it’s telling him to shut up.

“I’m not talking about _killing_ me, exactly,” he says. “Just like, stop focusing on what you’re doing now, whatever that is, and—have a snack if you need to? Then you can heal me up again once you’re better, or like—”

Eddie stops, cutting himself off. Was that…?

...he had felt something.

It’s not a _presence_ , exactly, but he’s almost certain that there had been a _feeling_ there, and maybe one that he’s not imagining. It's faint, very faint, like when he's lying in bed and can hear tinny music and is not sure if he is imagining it or if he's left a weird tab open on his computer and is too tired to go check.

It’s a protective feeling, if it's there, he's pretty sure: a shadow of the one he had sensed from Venom before the baby was born. 

“Are you worried?” he says. It’s hard to keep his voice quiet, but he tries. “I know you think it’s important for me to stay here and be healthy, but remember what I said the other day about compromising? We can compromise on us both not dying, right?”

No answer. Even that tiny hint of a feeling seems to be fading, like the music on his weird tab has played itself out, or the computer's battery is dead.

“V, it’s fine, I promise,” he goes on. “We’ve got our nice doctor friend here. We’ll figure out a way. Please. You saved my life and I owe you one. I mean, maybe not anymore, after what’s happened with the baby eating its way out of my stomach and everything. But you can’t make that up to me if you’re dead.”

No response. The presence, if it had ever actually been there, is gone. Nothing but silence and the little sting in his chest where the baby’s teeth are still inside him, the dull pain in his side.

“Venom. Please. I need you here to help me with this, so stop trying to make me better and eat my pancreas or something instead. You’ll do that, right?” He exhales. He can’t feel anything anymore, but he _had_ , and it has to mean something.

“You’ll do that,” he says. “I know you will.”

 

 

**25.**

 

 

“Your temperature's still looking great!” Dan says when he is done checking him over a few hours later. He sets down the thermometer on the bedside table and reaches to turn off the lamp next to it, and then stops. “What’s wrong, buddy? You’re not feeling nauseous or something, are you?”

Eddie shakes his head. “No,” he manages. “I feel fine.”

He is not sure what not having a pancreas feels like, but it’s presumably not as comfortable as this. Nothing hurts, he isn’t half dead, he doesn’t even have a decent sore throat. The music had not been real.

“He’s dead,” Eddie says out loud. “Venom is gone. He’s not coming back.”

“You’re tired,” Dan says, and squeezes his shoulder. “Rest up and you’ll feel better in the morning.”

 _I don’t want to rest anymore_ , he thinks, but he just says: “Will you hold the baby while I go to the bathroom?”

He doesn’t cry in there, although he thought he would. He spends some time washing his hands, and then wipes off his arms and the uninjured part of his torso with a hand towel. He still smells like blood.

“It was a dumb plan, Eddie,” he says to himself in the mirror.

On the edge of the sink, the formerly white hand towel is now an ugly pinkish-brown color. It seems rude to have done that to the towel now that there’s nothing clean left in the apartment, even though it technically belongs to him.

“I’m sorry I fucked up,” he says, even though he’s sure now that there’s no one else listening.

When he opens the door Dan is sitting on the edge of his bed. The baby symbiote is curled happily over one forearm, letting Dan stroke it with his other hand. Eddie's lamp is still on, lighting them both up like a halo, and the image looks like something out of a classical painting, if classical paintings contained images of alien babies that look like lumps of black tar heroin with teeth. Eddie has the briefest thought of turning, walking out of the apartment, and never coming back, because maybe that would be what is best for everyone.

“I'm definitely a fuckup,” he says to himself, and luckily Dan doesn’t hear.

He goes back to the bed, and Dan holds out his arm, nudges the symbiote to crawl back onto Eddie’s outstretched hand. He stands, touches Eddie’s shoulder again, then leaves.

“It’ll be okay,” Edge says to the baby, sitting down on the bed and turning off the light with his free hand as the baby slithers upwards along his arm to get back to his chest. “We will figure it out, all right? I’m gonna stick around here with you, and I won’t mess it up, and it’ll be okay. Promise.”

Luckily it’s just a dumb baby, so it doesn’t know that he is lying.

 

 

**26.**

 

 

He wakes up again to faint daylight and the sound of Anne trying to be quiet as she leaves the bathroom. The baby is no longer on his chest, and for a moment he fumbles around like a man who has lost an extremely precious and expensive cell phone, before he locates the little lump on one shoulder.

“Idiot,” he says to it. He moves one hand to pull it back to his chest and hold it there, even though just doing that hurts his side more than he expects. His head hurts from crying too much. In fact, his whole body aches: he’s overdue for another pill.

The symbiote stirs a little, short tendrils reaching out and wrapping around his fingers like little rings, and Eddie curls his hand into a loose fist in response.

Anne has stopped near the foot of the bed, obviously noticing him stirring. She’s wearing an oversized t-shirt that Eddie hasn’t seen before.

“Sorry,” she says. “but your floor creaks like hell. Go back to sleep.”

“My head hurts,” he mumbles. “I hate my life.”

“You’re fine,” she says. “Sleep time now.”

He closes his eyes, because that’s easier than talking, and waits for her to leave so he can start his morning off right with a nice round of crying. But when he opens them again after a few seconds, Anne is still standing there, looking at him.

“What is it?” Eddie says, louder. His mouth is dry. He should probably drink a glass of water to rehydrate before he begins his dedicated crying session.

“Eddie,” she says. “Are you all right?”

“That is a really stupid question,” he says.

Anne is over next to the bedside table already, the lamp table switching on again. The sudden bright against his eyes makes him feel nauseous, and he moans, holding the baby tighter.

“Dan,” she calls out above him. “Wake up, would you?”

Eddie pushes himself up with one arm, and looks down at himself, at the skin on his bare chest, at his hand pressed against the gooey symbiote. There’s a bit of weird color left all over his skin from the baby spitting up on him before, but that’s it: clearly none of his organs are missing, and Venom is still gone, and he really just wants to lie down and cry again and hug his dumb symbiote baby. “I’m fine,” he says.

“Dan,” she says again instead of answering, louder this time, and the baby curls up tighter like it’s annoyed at the noise, squishing out against his chest. “ _Dan!_ ” she yells and then there’s a loud thumping sound from the next room that must be Dan falling off the couch.

“He’s still dead,” Eddie says weakly. “I just need another pill.”

She doesn’t answer, and a second later Dan appears, looking as awake and confident as someone who has never fallen off a couch in his life.

For a moment, anyway. He sees Eddie and stops, his face going white. He’s trying to put that calm _I-am-a-doctor_ expression back on his face, and Eddie hasn’t seen him failing so hard at it since before he gave birth.

“…what is it?” Eddie asks.

“Eddie,” Dan says. “I think—”

“You’re kind of… yellow?” Anne says.

Eddie looks down at his bare skin again, then up at them. The baby squirms against his chest. Now that he thinks about it, that color _can’t_ be the blood the baby had spat up before. He had washed that off, in the bathroom.

Something stirs inside Eddie that isn’t an alien parasite, unless you could call the abstract concept of hope an alien parasite. In Eddie’s own life that description actually _does_ apply pretty well to the concept of hope, but still. It feels like hope.

“Don’t worry," Dan is saying. "You’re fine. We just—have to get you to a hospital." He’s patting the pockets of his pajama pants as he speaks, like he expects a phone to be there.

“Are my organs failing?” Eddie asks him.

“Buddy, I promise, we will get you help right away, we’ll figure out—”

“My organs are failing?” He clutches the baby tighter against him. He feels like he can barely breathe, and it’s only partially because he actually literally can’t breathe very well. “They are?”

Dan’s expression is enough of an answer.

He still can’t hear Venom, still can’t feel him. But this means—this must mean that Venom had listened. He’s alive, in some way. There is a _chance_. 

Eddie laughs out loud, and it hurts his side and his head and makes him feel like he might throw up, but it doesn’t matter. There is a chance!

He’s still holding the baby tight and it seems to be able to tell, seems to push in happily against his clammy skin.

“Is inappropriate laughter a symptom of organ failure?” Anne asks.

Eddie keeps laughing. This turns out to be a bad idea, and after about ten seconds he stops. “Oh god,” he says. “Annie, I’m sorry, I’m going to—”

Dan pushes his way in front of him, grabbing an armful of bedsheets and bundling them up in his lap just in time for Eddie lean down over them and throw up.

“Oh god,” he says again. “The sheets. The bed.  _Again_. I’m so sorry.”

“Eddie, Jesus, shut _up_.” Anne says. He sees her swipe at her eyes with the back of her hand out of the corner of his eye.

“It’s Venom,” he says, and has to stop to cough before he can say more. The baby is crawling up back towards his shoulder, like it's trying to move away from the vomit, as if it hadn’t just done the exact same thing to him. “We’re compromising,” he goes on. “I told him to eat my pancreas, and I—”

“Wait. Your pancreas?” Dan says.

“Your pancreas?” Anne says.

“Eddie,” Dan says. He’s still standing close, holding the edge of the bundled up lump of sheets. “Buddy, you don’t really want to mess around with—”

“Your _pancreas_?” Anne says.

Eddie tries to nod, and then the motion makes him throw up again.

Dan pushes the sheets up near his mouth just in time, and the fabric catches most of it.

“This is good,” he croaks, coughing the words out with the last of his stomach contents. “No, this is good. Bless you, organs! They’re failing. They’re _failing_ /”

“I’m calling a goddamn ambulance,” Anne says, stepping away from the bed.

“ _NO_ ,” Eddie yells from his bundle of filth-sheets.

“You’re dying,” she snaps. “You goddamn idiot. You don’t think we’re both sick of watching you _dying_?” She wipes at her face again, angrily, like she always does when she is crying, and Eddie can’t move because he will throw up again, so he can’t do anything to make it better.

He can’t do much at all, in fact. He is dizzy, his vision splotchy around the edges; he sure as hell has that sore throat _now_. He has to pause for breath before he can even go on.

“No,” he says again. “It’s going to be okay. I promise. I—I have a plan.”

 

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have a long chapter to make up for my long absence!

**27.**

 

 

“I am not in favor of this,” Dan says as he sets the sheep’s head down on the chopping board. It makes a wet _thud_ on the wooden surface. “Can you—maybe ask Venom to hold off a little instead, Eddie?”

“No,” Eddie says. He puts as much force into the word as he can, which isn’t much, because he’s having trouble just staying upright on the kitchen stool he’s sitting on. Every part of his body feels like it’s competing with every other part to see which one can hurt the most.

The baby is on Dan’s shoulder, a little lump of shiny black curled up next to the collar of his pajama shirt. It seems to be happy there, probably because Eddie still smells like vomit. It moves a little now, flattening out and sliding forward like it’s curious about the severed animal head in front of it.

Dan, on the other hand, is looking at him. “Eddie, Venom seems to be going for your liver as well, and without better medical care, that’s…” He pauses like he is trying to find the right words. “Not… good. And you, uh, you _really_ shouldn’t be eating without a pancreas.”

“It’s not for me,” Eddie says. Has this stool always been so hard to sit on? He wipes sweat off of his palms onto the clean sweatpants Anne had made him put on, then grabs onto the edge of the countertop, just with his fingertips, so that Dan won’t notice and make him move somewhere else. “It’s for Venom. I’m eating for Venom. He will eat it when it’s inside.”

Dan opens his mouth to say something, but then closes it. He looks tired. Anne makes a noise, as well, over from where she’s standing by the fridge. But she’s apparently still too angry to talk to him, because she doesn’t actually speak.

“Let me slice it for you, at least,” Dan says finally.

Eddie doesn’t have Venom here to help him break the skull this time, so he nods, and then continues hanging onto the countertop as Dan steps away to get a knife. He focuses on that, and on the head lying on its side in front of him, and it helps him to ignore the pain in his side and the fact that the temperature in the apartment seems to have dropped by twenty degrees since he woke up.

Dan returns with the biggest knife Eddie owns, and then he raises it, slams it down hard through the base of the sheep’s skull, splitting the bone across the back of the animal’s head. Eddie can see the brain there now, grayish pale-pink. He releases the countertop and reaches out to grab some.

Someone grabs his arm, and he looks up to see Anne by his side. “ _Jesus_ , Eddie,” she says.

He turns his head: in front of him, Dan still has the knife in his hand, and has frozen it in mid-downstroke. He’d been about to cut the head again.

“You have enough problems right now without losing your fingers,” Anne says, letting go of his arm.

“Sorry,” Eddie mumbles.

“It’s all right,” Dan says. “I have good reflexes.” He sets the knife down carefully near the edge of the cutting board, then turns away to wash his hands at the sink. On his shoulder, the baby on his shoulder ripples a little and draws back like it is disappointed at the lack of severed fingers.

Eddie ignores it. He reaches forward again with both hands, holds the head steady in one and uses the other to reach into the brain-hole. His fingertips touch what feels like cold tofu that’s been left in the back of the fridge too long and forgotten. The sheep’s eye is staring up at him, as if in judgement about his food choices.

“Sorry,” he says again, to the sheep this time, and tears off a chunk of the slimy goo.

It’s fine. He’s done this before. This is going to help them both be better. It will be fine.

He brings the lump of brain to his mouth, and immediately gags.

“I’m fine,” he coughs as Dan moves to grab him. “I’m okay.”

To prove it, he pushes the brain into his mouth, and then he gags again, violently enough that the chunk fails out of his mouth and splats onto the countertop. Eddie coughs, a thread of drool falling from his mouth. The taste of it is still on his tongue, meaty and raw and bloody. The chunk of brain lies there below him, looking like a group of worms who have tragically died in the middle of a worm orgy.

“I remember that taste,” Anne says. “It’s fucking awful.”

“It’s _not_ ,” Eddie says. “It’s delicious. It’s _always_ delicious.”

It’s not. That raging hunger, the one that made a mouthful of raw brain as good as the best thing he’s ever eaten, is gone now. So is Venom, swallowing it all down for him while Eddie is just along for the ride. This is just… eating brains. Raw, uncooked brain, the type his symbiote needs, shiny and slimy with blood vessels. Eddie’s stomach already feels like it’s given up and doesn’t want to be a stomach anymore.

He closes his eyes, inhales. He tries to hold himself as still as possible as he picks up the disgusting worm-lump and raises it back to his mouth. Pushes the brain past his dry lips, onto his tongue, breathing very carefully through his nose.

This time, somehow, it stays.

The texture still feels like forgotten tofu, and the taste is something indefinable that Eddie can only describe as _gross_. He almost gags again as he closes his mouth, but it goes down, and Eddie swallows and then slowly rests his head down on the counter, near the edge of the bloodied, sheep-covered cutting board. His head hurts, and now that it’s resting so comfortably on this nice flat surface it’s hard to lift it again. So he just stays slumped like that, and reaches out for another piece of brain.

“Eddie,” Dan says above him.

“I’m fine,” Eddie says from the counter. He’s too tired to bring the brain to his mouth right now, so he just keeps his hand resting on the cutting board.

“This is ridiculous,” Anne says. She’s still next to him, but from her tone of voice it’s clear that she would rather be back keeping her distance near the fridge.

“No it’s not,” Eddie says.

“What happens if you _both_ die doing this?” she says. “Huh? Did you not consider that? Who will look after the tiny cosmic horror then?”

“We won’t die,” Eddie mumbles against the countertop. “I won’t let that happen because I am going to eat a lot of brains.”

“God _damn_ you’re such an idiot sometimes.”

He doesn’t really have an argument for that, so he just turns his head as much as he can and attempts to eat another brain-chunk.

It works, this time, as well.

Eddie paces himself, and holds himself very still, and after a while the baby slithers itself down Dan’s arm where he’s standing next to the countertop, and pools out onto the countertop like a tiny oil slick. It moves curiously towards the edge of the cutting board.

“It wants some brain too,” Dan says, sounding impressed-verging-on-amazed, and Eddie moves his head again to get a better look. He does this just in time to see the symbiote slide right past the sheep’s head and flop towards the knife.

Dan says: “Hey, no, little guy, we need that—”

The knife. It’s going to eat the knife, and it’s too big for such a teeny symbiote. Eddie lurches forward, reaching for the baby.

It’s too much movement at once. His stomach exacts a sudden, terrible revenge.

He covers his mouth with his hand, too late, and then jerks backwards so he doesn’t throw up all over the head, and then falls back too far and loses his balance. A heavy _thunk_ as his back hits the tiled kitchen floor, jolting his side like a knife in the wound, the stool tipping over and crashing down off to his side.

And worse, much worse, it’s coming out of him already: every piece of precious brain, out of his mouth and splattering on the tiles.

No. _No_. He had worked so hard to eat these disgusting worm pieces. _No_.

He sucks in a breath; he can’t even breathe enough to cry, and his side hurts to much and he is dizzy and somewhere above him Anne says _this is ridiculous_ and Eddie looks up to see that she has gotten her cell phone from somewhere and she is holding it, one hand near the screen like she is about to dial.

“ _No_ ,” he says, out loud this time. He pushes himself up and makes a vomit-streaked lunge for the phone, which results first in her stepping back in surprise and then both Eddie and the phone crashing to the floor.

Dan says something, up at normal human height, but Eddie can barely hear it. He scoops up the phone and clutches it to his chest, breathing deeply. “No hospital. No. Hospital.”

“Oh yeah?” she snaps. “What are you going to do, eat the phone?”

He looks down at it.

“Eddie, _please do not eat the phone._ ”

“I’ll get the baby to eat it! It likes metal!”

“That baby isn’t big enough to eat a whole phone. Maybe if it was 2003 and I had one of those tiny flip phones! But it’s not! And I don’t!”

“Guys,” Dan says.

Eddie ignores him and turns away, throws the phone as far as he can, which isn’t far, considering he can barely move. It lands on the wooden floor just outside of the kitchen area, slides half a foot, and then comes to a slow, pathetic stop.

“Oh,” Anne says. “Now you’re dying _and_ an asshole. Great.”

“Guys,” Dan says. “ _Guys_. You’re upsetting the baby.”

Eddie looks up.

 _The baby_.

He flops against the edge of the countertop, yanks himself to his feet and almost falling down again from the pain in his side. The little black blob is sitting on the cutting board, next to the half-eaten kitchen knife. It seems to be trembling slightly.

“Sorry,” Eddie gasps. “Oh god, I’m sorry, I’m _sorry_.” He slumps forward with enough force to reach the symbiote, picks it up in his cupped hands.

“It’s okay,” Dan says. “It’s not that bad, I just wanted to—”

“Yeah, Eddie, it’s fine,” Anne says. “We should be talking about—”

It’s _not_ fine. He had been worried about it eating the knife and then he had gotten distracted and _forgotten_ it, can’t they see that? He had _forgotten a baby_ and now it is _scared._ He is awful at this. He is _awful_ at this and _he_ _needs Venom_ and if his plan is not going to work, then—

He pulls the baby tight against his chest, then feels worse because he still smells awful and is even more covered in vomit now, and also because hugging it makes him hurt a lot worse. He sniffs, and clutches it tighter against him anyway. 

Someone has their arm around him, and Eddie lets them move him, and a few moments later he letting himself be guided back onto his bed. The sheets have been stripped at some point, leaving just a bare mattress, which feels cold against the bare skin on his back. There must be nothing clean left in the house now.

Lying down hurts. The baby settles itself against his chest, and then he feels little teeth probing at an area on his upper chest. He is shaking, hard enough to feel it in his own teeth. He closes his eyes.

He can’t take care of this thing. He needs Venom.

Dan is at the side of the bed, and Eddie feels Anne sit down on the other side, spreading a blanket over his legs. She leans over and wipes his chest down with something cool and wet. It’s gentle, but somehow she still manages to do it in a way that registers her displeasure at the entire situation.

She’s just getting the vomit off him, he knows, but it's wet and he is so cold.

Another, colder sensation of the thermometer in his armpit, then a pause, movement. Dan says something that sounds reassuring, and then starts unwrapping the gauze on his side. He had looked at it earlier as well, before he had let Eddie get up to eat the brain. He had made a little disappointed noise back then, and he makes the same noise now.

It hurts. Dan pulls the blanket up higher when he is done, tucking it in around the little symbiote, but the wound at Eddie's side still hurts, raw. His throat aches from the vomiting and the symbiote’s teeth are too tight in his chest.

“Eddie,” Dan says, and Eddie opens his eyes. He's taking off the disposable gloves he is wearing, and he puts them in a little plastic bag he’s set up by the bed. “We all understand what you’re doing, and why you don’t want to go to a hospital. But maybe you should think about what’s best for this little guy right here.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” Eddie says weakly.

Dan nods, and squeezes his forearm. “Listen, Eddie. Maybe the little monster will do just fine with the guy who’s willing to get his pancreas eaten to try to protect it. Maybe it will do just fine with the guy who ate sheep’s brains because he was worried he wouldn’t be a good enough dad. Think about that?”

Eddie just looks looks at him. Dan looks right back, until Eddie has to turn away. He looks down at the lump resting on his chest instead. His throat still hurts, and it feels tight now, too.

“Just let me try one more time,” he says. “And”—he takes a breath—“I’ll let you take me in to the hospital if it gets bad after that. I promise. I’ll let Anne call an ambulance. I won’t eat her phone. But let me try again.”

He looks back up at Dan in time to see him shaking his head slightly. “Buddy,” he says. “I’ll be honest with you here. Based on what I think is going on with your organs, I don’t know how the hell you’re still conscious.”

“But—that’s good, isn’t it? That’s _good_. It means Venom’s in there. It’s good.”

Dan tries out a not-very-convincing smile. “Sure. Maybe it is, Eddie.”

“It’s not,” Anne says.

Eddie ignores that. “Let me try one more time. Just once. I’ll go if it doesn’t work. I promise.”

Dan nods, and gets up. Eddie lies on his back, cups one hand over the baby, and waits for him to bring him more brain.

 

 

**28.**

 

 

The apartment is too bright to sleep in, even though he is exhausted and everything hurts. Eddie lies still, with the symbiote still latched onto him, and he still feels like he has been punched in the stomach by a truck, but the brain Dan had helped him eat doesn’t come back up, and neither does the water he had made him drink afterward.

Voices and sounds drift in, even though Eddie tries to ignore them and concentrate on not puking. The upstairs neighbor is talking loudly on his cellphone about a broken internet connection. That means today must be Saturday: that neighbor always watches porn in the afternoon on Saturdays, and he probably can’t load any videos right now. Closer, in the living room, Anne is talking too. When Eddie focuses in on that and tries to listen to that over the neighbor's yelling, he hears something about going to a pharmacy.

Dan responds, his voice calm, and Eddie picks out the words _I'm not an endocrinologist_.

 _Don’t throw up_ , he thinks. _Don’t throw up_. What does an endocrinologist do, anyway? Does Dan want to take him to see one?

No, Dan isn’t going to do anything like that, not unless Eddie gets worse. Dan had said—

A sudden noise from upstairs: the neighbor has slammed a door, meaning probably that his broken internet problem wasn’t resolved. The baby jolts against Eddie's chest, biting down harder into the skin of his chest. Eddie bites down on his tongue. _Don’t throw up_.

Dan had said that he thought this baby would be okay with him. Dan doesn’t know what a fuckup Eddie is. But on the other hand the baby _does_ know what a fuckup he is, it can't not know. And it is still here.

Eddie lifts his hand to stroke his fingers along its smooth back, even though moving that much makes his nausea surge.

“I’ll stay here for you,” he whispers as softly as he can. “I promise. I really will stop this if I have to. I will stay here for you no matter what.”

It’s still a dumb gullible baby, but this time it isn’t a lie.

 

 

**29.**

 

 

When he wakes up in the late afternoon it’s quieter, and he is still not covered in vomit. Dan takes his temperature again, checks his side, holds his wrist to feel his pulse. Anne sits down on the edge of the bed nearby: she looks a lot calmer now, which means she has probably taken one of her rage-naps and then woken up better able to deal with him.

“How am I doing?” he asks as Dan removes his gloves.

“Well, you’re still talking to us.”

Anne leans in closer to look and then says: “I think you look a bit less like a sunflower?”

Eddie nods. When he looks down, she seems to be right. And he might be imagining it, and it might just be because he has been lying down, but he _does_ feel better. His side hurts, but it doesn’t hurt as _much_ , and the nausea has receded to what feels like a manageable, moderate-depression-hangover level. He needs to pee as well, and that’s a good sign, right? Something inside must be working if he needs to pee.

He can get up. He can start on another of those sheep heads, and just keep going with his plan. He pushes one hand onto the symbiote still on his chest to support it, and starts to sit up.

“Whoa, buddy,” Dan says. “What are you doing?”

“Bathroom.”

“Ok, I get it. But ask me for help, okay?”

“I’m fine. I am doing better. I can walk.”

“No you can’t,” says Anne.

He lets them lead him there. The baby climbs up onto his shoulder, on the same side as where Dan is standing, and then stretches out a few little black  tendrils like it wants to go to him, so Eddie lets it. Anne reluctantly lets him go inside the room by himself, and then Eddie stands in front of the toilet, one palm pressed against the wall to keep himself steady. With his other hand he—

He stops. He feels something. In his head. He _feels something_.

“…Venom?” he whispers.

No response, but it is there. He is sure of it. He carefully looks over his shoulder, where the door has been left open a crack for his safety, and then faces forward again.

“Venom,” he whispers again. “Why did you wait to let me sense your presence until I was holding my dick?”

Still no response, but Eddie already feels so light inside that it’s hard to concentrate enough to pee.

“I’m so happy you’re doing better,” he whispers. “Don’t push yourself, okay? I can wait.”

The silence seems to indicate agreement.

He doesn’t quite have it in him to lean down and flush the toilet, but it’s okay. Venom is doing better, and also, Eddie has been around such very stable people for so long now that he is becoming sensible too. He’d told Venom he could wait!

He turns and shuffles out of the bathroom, still steadying himself on the wall with one arm. He feels a bit dizzy from standing up for so long, but that is okay as well. “Dan,” he says. “Annie! I think I felt—”

The dizziness is stronger, and he has to stop talking. It’s still okay, though: Dan catches his arm, supporting his weight.

But the fuzziness in his head only deepens, seeping in at the corners of his vision, turning everything around him too-light and grey.

“No,” he says. No. Not now. Not now—

Everything is getting fuzzier, but Eddie can still see the room tilt as Dan lowers him to the ground before he falls. Can see the baby on Dan’s shoulder, a tiny patch of frozen darkness against his shirt. And he sees Anne, with her phone already in her hand, her face very pale, her thumb moving as she dials.

This time, he does not stop her.

 

 

 


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>   
>  Thanks again for all the comments, I appreciate each one.  
>   
> 

 

**30.**

 

 

The floor is cold under Eddie’s back, and it hurts. Everything hurts.

Above him, Dan is talking. The conversation sounds one-sided, but he can’t tell for sure because it’s hard to focus: his whole body, from head to foot, is surrounded by a terrible, aching dizziness, like he is being enveloped in a thick dark cloud that has developed the ability to punch people and also personally hates him.

He can’t feel Venom. He can barely feel himself. There is just the pain and the sickness in his stomach and the cloud-punching and that strange sound he can hear in the background, like gravel being stepped on.

He tries to breathe. He has to find out what is happening to him. He can do it if he tries. He opens his mouth.

“Guhhh,” Eddie says.

Dan’s hand squeezes down on his bare shoulder: Eddie hadn’t realized until now that his hand was there. Through the hurt-fog, he sees that Dan is holding Anne’s phone to his ear with his other hand. The sight makes him hurt worse, because apparently that is somehow possible. His skin feels cold and dull, as if the pain has sucked everything living out of it. He’s wet all over like he’s just dragged himself out of the bay. 

“Guh,” he says again. He can’t get his mouth to do what he wants. The gravel-sound is loud in his ears.

“It’s okay, bud,” Dan says now, the phone still by his ear. “You said it hurts most in the upper abdomen, correct? Are you able to nod?”

Eddie just looks up at him. He doesn’t remember saying anything. He doesn’t remember it not hurting _everywhere_. He doesn’t— _where is the baby?_

He must try to move, because Dan’s grip on his shoulder gets firmer. “Shh, it’s okay. Just breathe slowly.” Into the phone, he says: “No, I’m not sure, we are having a bit of trouble—listen, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to hang up now and focus on my patient. Call us back when they’re near.”

The person on the other end of the phone might argue, Eddie doesn’t know: he can’t hear it over that noise. Next to him, Dan is already putting down the phone.

“Guhh,” Eddie says: his mouth still won’t do what he wants, and neither will his jaw, and it is becoming clear now that the weird noise that he can hear is the sound of his own teeth chattering.

“ _Slowly_ , Eddie, breathe slowly. Anne, would you fetch me a pillow or two? I’m going to try sitting him up a little.”

Something moves in the corner of his vision, and Eddie tries to turn his head to look, but Dan’s hand is already cupped around the back of his neck, lifting him forward off the cold floor. The movement hurts. He is shaking everywhere.

“Another one, maybe,” Dan says, and there’s more movement, and then he is eased out of Dan’s grip and back onto the pillows. Soft fabric against his back now, although somehow it still feels cold.

“Is that any better?”

It is, and he nods. The new, propped-up position reduces a heaviness in his stomach that he hadn’t realized was there: it’d blended into the general pain landscape.

Dan lays something else soft over his legs: from the smell, it is probably a sheet from the bed. It’s warmer, though, and after a minute or two the noise in his skull dies down.

“Ba—” he says when his face is almost doing what he wants it to, which is forming words. “Baby?”

“The baby is right here,” Anne says.

This time, he can actually move his head enough to see her: Anne has the symbiote pressed in front of her chest with both hands, the way she used to hold the cat sometimes back when they lived together. It is still, flopped in her hands like a shiny black beanbag, like it’s asleep. Or scared.

He wants to reach for it, but a quick check of his limbs reveals that they are still shaking too much. He doesn’t want to drop it and add yet another stop to his extensive Fucking Everything Up tour.

“Am I…” It’s still hard to talk. “What—”

“We’re going to figure that out, Eddie. Right now you’ve just got a bit of swelling here in your abdomen, and—”

“Oh, Jesus goddamn Christ,” Anne says from above them. “He’s pregnant _again_?”

“I’m pregnant again? I can’t—I don’t have enough—”

“No. That wasn’t a symptom last time,” Dan says. “It could be your liver. I’m not, uh, I’m not actually sure which organs you still have right now. But we are going to figure that out real soon, okay? Me and Anne can take care of the baby while the people at the hospital help me figure it out, and fix you up.”

Eddie looks at him. The apartment has gone quiet now, without the noise of his teeth. It’s quiet enough to hear the rain against the window, and the faint sounds of a video playing upstairs. It sounds like his neighbor has finally had his internet fixed and is able to watch porn again. At least somebody is having a good day.

“The little guy won’t be alone,” Dan goes on. “Don’t worry about that.”

He wants to nod, but it doesn’t work. He feels stiff, and like his body is too far away. “I couldn’t eat enough,” he says. “I fucked up. I’m sorry.”

Dan takes his hand: Eddie notices the warmth of his skin more than the touch. He still feels so cold.

“If I had to guess,” he says, “I’d say that, among other things, there’s something going wrong with your pancreas. Which might be a good sign, because it means that you somehow have a pancreas again. Which means, maybe…”

He trails off. He looks like he’s trying to be encouraging, but he’s a doctor: it’s his job to try to be encouraging when things have clearly failed. This is probably the same tone he uses after a patient tells him they're going to treat their inoperable cancer with a vegan diet and homeopathy.

“You don’t have to say that," Eddie says. "I know he won’t come out if I’m around other doctors. He’ll stop trying to get better.” His throat feels tight. “He’s gone.” He doesn’t say the part about what that maybe means for him.

Dan doesn’t say anything. He looks like he’s trying to think of something to reply with, but then the phone rings, and he seems almost relieved when he answers.

Even without hearing the voice on the other line Eddie knows who it is. The ambulance is almost here.

“So like…” he says after Dan has hung up. “If I don’t get better either, and it gets hungry—”

“Eddie...” Anne says.

“You probably don’t want to have it on you at work, Annie. You could get Dan to try? See if it will feed off him? He could like—hide it under his clothes or something. Say it’s a tumor, maybe. Would people trust a doctor with a tumor?”

“Shut up,” Anne says. “You’re going to be fine. Just shut _up_ , you idiot.”

“I just want you to give it a name, Annie, something that isn’t stupid? You can think of something. Just don’t call it Eddie Jr. or something like that. That’s a terrible name.”

Anne doesn’t answer. Her face has gone very red. She looks down at him for a moment longer, and then turns away and walks off.

“Annie?” he calls, weakly.

“Honey?” Dan calls after her as well.

No answer. She disappears into the direction of the kitchen, still holding the baby.

“I’m sorry I made her mad,” he says. “It’s probably something I did.”

“She just cares about you.”

Eddie nods, and Dan shifts his hand so his fingers are laced through Eddie's now. It feels nice, warm still against his sweaty skin.

“Can you delete my browser history if I die?” Eddie says. “There’s also a bunch of videos on my phone that I took here as well. I was kinda experimenting with like, different angles and things, so I could watch later. They might look a little—”

“I will delete all of them without watching,” Dan says.

Eddie nods again.

“Dan,” he says. “Dan. I want to say that…”

_Thunk_.

Eddie starts and looks up, and then back down at the object on the wooden floor beside him.

A sheep’s head, lying on its side on the floorboards. The dark eye on its side is staring up at the ceiling like it’s angry at the neighbor up there for his filthy self-abuse habits.

Anne is standing there when Eddie glances back up again, looking giant from Eddie’s angle. Her arms are folded across her chest. The baby symbiote has climbed up onto one shoulder, a little black tendril clinging over the back of her neck.

“Honey,” he hears Dan say calmly. “Eddie can’t eat any more heads. He can’t even—”

Anne cuts him off with a look, which she then turns back to Eddie. She looks so pissed off that Eddie is momentarily afraid she will pick up the sheep’s head again and hit him with it. He supposes it can’t do much more harm at this point.

Instead, she steps closer and then jabs at his side with her shoe, in a way that he knows should be painful but is actually just numb. He winces, looking up at her, and then she starts yelling.

“COME OUT AND EAT THIS GODDAMN HEAD RIGHT NOW, VENOM. PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER.”

Eddie opens his mouth to speak, but she jabs at his side again, more of a kick this time. “ASSHOLE,” she yells. “YOU SEE HOW MUCH EDDIE HAS DONE FOR YOU? MAKE A FUCKING EFFORT AND _HELP HIM_.”

Eddie stares up at her. The baby, bunched up on her shoulder, starts to move down her arm like it wants to get away from the situation entirely. Eddie wants to reach for it, but he can’t bring himself to move.

“DO IT!” she yells. “I HAVE YOUTUBE ON MY PHONE, VENOM. I CAN PLAY ANY SOUND EFFECT I WANT, AND I WILL! I’LL TELL THEM TO LOCK EDDIE IN THEIR GODDAMN MRI MACHINE FOR AN _HOUR_ , YOU HEAR ME?”

The baby is clinging to her arm now. Anne doesn’t seem to notice. She takes a step back, and kicks the sheep’s head this time. It bounces off of Eddie’s side and does a single half-roll, flopping over and then rocking to a gradual stop like a sad, undignified watermelon.

The apartment is quiet. Nothing moves.

“God damn it, Venom, you fucking _idiot_ ,” Anne says, and then bursts into tears.

Eddie doesn’t know what else to do, so he just keeps staring up at her. The symbiote is still clinging to her arm, and Anne reaches out and moves it onto her chest again, patting it absently. The room is very quiet. Even the guy upstairs appears to have turned off his porn to listen to them.

“I’m sorry, Anne,” Dan says.

Eddie can’t bring himself to speak. The continued silence inside his head should be painful. He should at least feel _something_. But he just wants to hold the stupid baby. He can’t, though, because the ambulance people will be here any second and he’ll have to give the baby back to Anne so that they don’t see it, and what if it gets upset when he does that? Eddie couldn’t take that happening, he is too weak, he—

He sobs, suddenly and violently, and the movement in his chest and stomach hurts so much that he yells out like an idiot, and then sobs some more.

Dan’s hand is still in his, his grip firm. He says: “Eddie, why don’t we—” and then it happens.

Something dark is there, growing on the floor near Eddie’s waist, and when Eddie sees it he thinks for a moment that it is blood, that his latest sobbing fit has torn something open and he is going to be the first person ever in the medical literature to cry himself to death.

But then—and it seems like it’s a very long time—the little pool spreads out and moves, and it is _too dark to be blood_ , and Eddie can’t breathe, he can’t breathe but it’s a _good_ not being able to breathe—

“V?” he tries to say, but it just comes out as another undignified weeping sound.

The blackness spools out, still so slowly, dividing like a stream of water into something like fingers, and then into something like a hand. Slowly, very, slowly, it coils around the surface of the sheep’s head. Then in one quick motion the hand-thing clenches, and the head cracks, brain and bone pieces splattering to the wooden floor around it like it’s a piñata at a birthday party for serial killers.

Nobody moves except for the symbiote baby, which squirms a little in Anne’s arms.

The dark hand moves to grasp the largest piece of brain from the floor, and then slides back towards Eddie, upwards this time, towards where his head is still propped up on the pillows. Eddie automatically opens his mouth, and lets the hand push the piece of flesh inside.

It’s the best thing he has ever tasted.

He knows he’s not eating it, not _really:_ he’s just along for the eating ride here, but it’s still amazing. He must be experiencing Venom’s own craving for the stuff, and it feels so good that he pushes himself up into a more upright position to get at the next piece quicker. It hurts, but Eddie doesn’t care: he opens his mouth to take in the second brain-chunk, lets Venom push it firmly into his mouth, swallows without chewing.

“Well,” Dan says finally. “…huh.”

“Oh god,” Eddie says. “That is so good, Venom, thank you. Oh god. _More_.”

“Does the baby symbiote have eyes?” Anne asks. “Can I cover them?”

Another brain piece in his mouth, and then another, and then it’s already over. Eddie reaches out for the hand to grab at it, but it’s already slipping back in through his skin. He moans, leans back into the pillows. There is quiet in his head, but it’s a different quiet now, a peaceful one. After a moment, Anne’s phone starts ringing again, but no one answers it.

“Well,” Dan says again. “Uh, all right. I guess Venom is still scared of Anne.”

 

 

**31.**

 

 

“Okay,” Anne says, turning towards the door to the apartment. “I can take care of the EMT guys. Fuck. Um. I guess I didn’t think that would work. But it’s fine. I’ll go downstairs and use my lawyer voice.”

Dan says: “Honey, before you go…”

“It is a _very good_ lawyer voice, Dan,” she says, looking affronted. “Please don’t doubt me right now.”

“Anne,” he says. “You _still have the little symbiote on you_.”

“Oh,” Anne says, looking down to where she is still holding the baby. “Oh. Sorry.”

She hands it over to Dan, then turns away. A few seconds later, the door clicks shut behind her.

“Can I have it?” Eddie asks. His arms are wrapped around his own torso, like he’s giving himself a hug. It hurts, and his skin feels hot and sweaty and somehow swollen, but he doesn’t care. “Can I have the baby back now?”

Dan holds it out to him. It shifts forward toward him, sliding eagerly into Eddie’s grip. Eddie can already see a few teeth coming out, so it must have really missed him.

“Be careful,” Dan says as Eddie pulls it in close, hugging it to his chest. “It might be scared if it doesn’t know why you’re crying.”

 

 

 


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love you all
> 
>   
> 

**32.**

 

 

_This meat is all cooked_ , Venom says in Eddie’s head as Anne sets down the takeout containers on the coffee table in front of them. _Disgusting_.

Eddie doesn’t convey the symbiote’s message to Anne, but she must figure it out from seeing the look on his face, because she says: “Eddie, it’s eight o clock on a Saturday night. If your buddy wants more raw organ meat, he can find the goddamn organs himself. Or he can shut up and eat his Sichuan food, and stop being a dick.” She peels the lid off a container and shoves it toward him.

“Sorry,” Eddie says. He leans forward, slowly, trying not to pull at his side too suddenly. The baby stirs where it’s resting against his stomach, and Eddie pats it gently. The apartment is quiet and dim: Dan had fallen asleep on Eddie’s bed after washing his sheets again, and Anne had reacted by turning all the lights off, saying that Dan deserved his fucking rest.

Venom’s probably just tired too, Eddie thinks.

Thing is, he actually agrees with Anne: Venom _is_ kind of being a dick.The comment about the meat had been only the third thing the symbiote had said in the last two hours. And his first two comments were _also_ about food. Eddie is happy he is alive, of _course_ he is, but the baby has been right here the _whole time_ Venom has been awake, and he hasn’t even said anything about—

 

**_HUNGRY_. **

 

“ _Okay_ ,” Eddie says. “Sheesh.” He grabs the nearest clear plastic container, picks it up with the hand that’s not still steadying the baby symbiote. Some kind of meat-lumps in a sauce, unidentifiable in this light but still looking goddamn delicious.

“There’s chopsticks right there,” Anne says as Eddie raises the container to his mouth. “Or I could get you a—oh, okay, oh. You could eat it like that too, I guess.”

Eddie swallows it, gulping quickly to get it down his throat as soon as possible. The food is not as good as the raw animal brains—Venom had been right about that—but it’s still wonderful, even if the sauce burns his throat and some of it spills down over his neck and chest. He drops the empty container on the coffee table, grabs the one next to it. His tongue feels like part of the surface has burnt off, and his side and his chest hurt from moving so quickly, but it’s still so _good_ , the feeling spreading all through his body like a relaxing food-massage.

The next dish has something that might be liver in it, and it looks just as amazing. It’s hard to tip it all into his mouth with only one hand free, but he does his best and only drips a little bit of sauce onto the baby on his stomach. It doesn’t seem to mind.

“Joke’s on you,” Anne says from the armchair next to the couch. “I ordered a vegan dish so you two wouldn’t eat everything.”

Eddie eats the vegan dish.

“Well,” she says. “Fine. Is there anything I can order in that Venom won’t like?”

“Probably not,” Eddie says.

She sighs. “I guess I’ll go look for something in the kitchen.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says.

Anne sighs again and stands up.

_That was acceptable_ , Venom says when the food is all gone.

Eddie nods. Just tired, he thinks.

He leans back against the back of the couch, slowly again now, hand still on the baby. The food he’d splashed on himself is getting cold now, chilling his bare skin. He wipes off the little splashes that had spilled on the baby with his thumb, wipes his thumb on the couch. The little symbiote twitches a bit at the motion, a tiny tooth poking its way out of the black like it’s thinking about biting him, but then it settles back down, the tooth slipping back in and disappearing. Eddie strokes it again. Venom doesn’t say anything else.

Quiet enough so that Anne won’t hear from the kitchen, he says: “V, do you want to come out and hold the baby now? I think it’s asleep, but I can wake it.”

_I am tired,_ Venom says. _I require heads. More organs. I would like a whole human body._

“I told you before, Dan and Anne can get you more sheep parts soon. Or other animals, if you want.”

_Dan is a doctor,_ Venom says _. He can acquire human heads._

“It doesn’t work that way,” Eddie says. “Anyway, I thought we were doing okay now.”

_We would be doing better if you could acquire me a human head._

“V, the baby is right here. Do you want to hold it?”

Silence, but it’s the type of silence Eddie sometimes senses right before Venom is about to _do_ something, and for a moment Eddie thinks that he was right, that Venom is just tired and everything is okay, that Venom is going to—

But then Venom just says: _It is still alive. That is good._

“Come on, V. Don’t you even want to hold it?”

_I would like to hold some human organs,_ Venom says _. And then eat them._

Eddie doesn’t answer him. He holds the baby tighter, and doesn't say anything else to him at all.

 

 

**33.**

 

 

“You’re doing so much better,” Dan says later, taking off his latex gloves and putting them in the little plastic disposal bag that’s next to him on the couch cushion. “Let’s just makes sure you keep resting and drinking lots of water, okay?”

“I’ll try,” Eddie says. The baby is curled up on Dan’s shoulder, where it had crawled halfway through the examination. He can’t help but notice how happy it looks there.

“You can maybe even have a real shower in the morning if you’re doing well,” Dan says.

“Oh, thank God,” says Anne from the armchair.

Dan glances up at her.

“What? He smells like someone threw up in an abattoir.”

“Excuse her, she’s tired,” Dan says, and stands up. “Come on Eddie, let’s get you to bed. It’s late.”

Eddie nods. He’s hungry again, but he ignores that. He lets Dan stand him up and lead him to the bed. The sheets look soft and clean, although clearly going through the wash hadn’t quite been able to get all of the bloodstains out. He hopes that Dan hadn’t run into anyone while he was doing the laundry downstairs.

“Thank you,” he says when Dan helps him lie down. Dan reaches up to peel the baby off his own shoulder, but it gloops forward, sliding out of his grip. It stays there, flattening itself out against the side of his neck.

“You should keep it for now,” Eddie says. “It likes you.”

“Alright, buddy,” Dan says. He smiles at him, comforting, and then turns the lamp off.

After he leaves, Eddie curls up on his good side and closes his eyes.

The inside of his head has been silent for a while, but it’s not _that_ silent; it’s not like before. Venom is there, and Eddie could talk to him, if he wanted to, and get an answer. But if Eddie started talking, started asking questions, what would Venom say? He hadn’t reacted at all when Dan was holding the baby. He hadn’t said anything about the baby at all.

Eddie squirms, uncomfortable against the sheets, and finally reaches out to grab a pillow from the other side of the bed and holds it against his chest. It aches where it presses on his side, but it’s something to hug and just it doesn’t feel right, sleeping alone like this.

Maybe the baby had stayed with Dan because it knows, he thinks. Maybe it has figured out that it’s not wanted, and it's trying to go with a more stable choice.

The mattress shifts, and Eddie opens his eyes to see Anne sitting down next to him. She reaches out in the dark, puts her hand on his own where it’s clutching at his sad chest-pillow.

“You’re a good dad, Eddie,” she says.

He blinks up at her.

“I’m serious. I mean you’re an idiot in general, and the food selection in your kitchen sucks, and you smell like some Chinese food went to Hell, but you’re a good dad and the little slime monster loves you. You know that, right?”

Eddie blinks again.

“Just go to sleep, okay,” she says, and flicks him on the back of the hand. But she lets Eddie hold on to her wrist, just for a moment, before she stands up and goes to the other room, disappearing into the dark.

 

 

**34.**

 

 

_Eddie_ , Venom says.

“Mm,” Eddie says, pushing his face into the warm pillow. The room is still dark.

_Hungry, Eddie._

He doesn’t need Venom to tell him that. It can't have been more than a few hours, but the hunger is already doing a good job at competing with how tired he feels _._

_Hungry. Go to the kitchen._

“Shut up,” Eddie says into the pillow, and goes back to sleep.

 

 

**35.**

 

 

“Eddie.”

This time, it’s light in the room when he wakes up, and the voice is not inside his brain. Eddie lifts his head: the pillow he’d fallen asleep cuddling had found its way up in front of his face sometime during the night, and he’d drooled all over it. The way he feels right now, he is vaguely relieved he had not tried to eat it.

He pushes it away from his face. Dan’s kneeling next to the bed, still in his pajamas, holding the baby out to him. “I think it’s hungry,” he says. “It wants you. Do you want some water or anything?”

_We need much more than water._

Eddie ignores him, and reaches out to take the baby from Dan. He pulls it in close against his skin, and then there’s the familiar pinch of its teeth digging in, cutting him. It stays like that, pressed against him and looking as perfectly content as a tiny lumpy symbiote can look, and even though his stomach hurts with the hunger Eddie wants to weep with relief.

Venom doesn’t react.

“You doing okay, buddy?” Dan asks.

_No,_ Venom says _. We are hungry. We are—_

“Shut _up_ ,” Eddie snaps. “Can’t you see I’m talking to someone who actually gives a shit about me and the baby?”

Silence.

“Uh,” Dan says after a few seconds. “You know what, I was planning on having a shower now that we’ve got clean towels again. Anne’s back at the house picking up some stuff. So how about you guys… talk… while you're alone, and you just call out if you need me, Eddie. That sound okay?”

“Yes,” Eddie says.

Dan stands up, and disappears into the bathroom.

Eddie lies there, stroking the happily latched baby, until after he hears the shower go on. Then he sits up.

_Eddie—_

“No,” he says. “I am not done.”

He takes a deep breath, and then pushes himself up. He doesn't faint, which is good, and he starts to move haltingly toward the kitchen, cupping the baby carefully against his chest. “You get to listen to _me_ now," he says. "I get to tell _you_ to do things. Like, telling me why the hell you were so hellbent on knocking me up. What was the point of that, Venom? Why do it if you weren’t even going to like your own baby?”

_I did everything that was required for our offspring,_ Venom says _._

“No,” Eddie snaps. He finally reaches the kitchen counter and grabs onto the edge, steadying himself. “That’s not the point. You’re supposed to _like_ it too. You’re supposed to be _interested_ in it.” He tries to catch his breath. He is so hungry he can’t breathe. “You’re supposed to at least _pretend_ , you idiot space-worm.”

_You are a stupid human,_ Venom says _. Eat the coffee machine._

Eddie steps over to it. Someone has put the cracked carafe back on the machine's hot plate, and he pushes that aside and then picks the machine up, slams it down against the counter with his free hand until the plastic on the bottom cracks open.

“I thought you’d be happy,” he says, pulling chunks of plastic off of the base. “I thought you’d ask about it. Tell me more about it. Maybe help me give it a _name_.”

_I—_

“No. No. You are still listening.” The heating element inside the base is thick and made of copper: Eddie yanks it out, tossing the broken machine aside onto the floor, and stuffs it into his mouth. It’s delicious, like a very conductible donut, and he works off a chunk with his teeth as he lets himself slide down until he’s sitting on the kitchen floor, leaning against the cabinet.

“I don’t even want you here if you’re not going to care about our baby,” he goes on.“That would be a bad influence on it. It would be better if you were gone.” He bites off another chunk, grinding the metal between his molars to make it easier to swallow. It still hurts as it goes down, scratching the inside of his cheeks at the back of his mouth, tearing him up all the way down his throat. But it feels good, eases the lightness in his head. He feels stronger. What he is saying now is _right_.

“You know what?” he says. “Just leave. Get out of me and leave already.”

There’s a pause as Eddie takes another bite of the heating element. Finally Venom says: _You are not healed yet, Eddie._

“I don’t care.” Eddie reaches over to where the coffee machine is lying, still holding the baby with his other hand, and then lifts it and bites off the extension cord. He chews off a chunk of insulation: there's more copper inside, thin wires this time, and he bites down on it. His mouth is bleeding. “I don’t care _at all_ right now. You can go live inside a raccoon and eat garbage. That’s what you deserve, asshole.”

_Eddie_.

“No,” Eddie says, and holds the baby tighter with his other hand. “I want you gone. You don’t even care. I want you in a raccoon. A raccoon with rabies that gives you rabies as well.”

_You are not—_

“Good parents are interested in their offspring!” He bites off another long chunk of wire, scraping off the insulation like it's an artichoke leaf. “They _love_ them. They want to _be around_ them so that their kids don’t turn out lonely and fucked up. And if you are gonna be like my dad, then you can _fuck right off_.”

Silence.

Eddie is breathing hard. He spits out another little piece of insulation that had gotten caught up with the copper in his mouth: it falls to the tiled floor beside him, bloody. He cups his hand tighter around the baby. The little symbiote is trembling a bit, like his yelling had scared it. Its teeth are still latched in his skin. The apartment is quiet except for the sound of the shower going in the bathroom and of one of his neighbors listening to a very loud self-help audiobook.

Then:

_That will not happen, Eddie._

“Shut up,” Eddie starts to say again, but then he feels it.

Venom is sliding out through his skin. Eddie has to force himself not to grab at the parts that appear, and he stays still, just holding onto the baby as the long tendrils wrap their way around him.

_We are different, Eddie,_ Venom says _. But you have taught me many things._ The tentacles thicken, wrap themselves around his torso, his shoulders. _Even though you are very stupid._

Eddie exhales. He wants to shiver when one tentacle slides over the bandaged cut on his side. He grits his teeth, but it makes him want to lean into it more. “You—” he says. “ _You’re_ stupid.”

_You are._

One of the tentacles reaches out, finally, and touches the baby where it is latched onto his chest, next to Eddie’s hand as he holds it. Eddie looks down, keeps his eyes on it: the baby shrinks down a little like it’s not used to the touch, but a few seconds later it seems to calm, getting distracted again by the drinking. Venom’s tentacle splits, wrapping a smaller tendril around one of Eddie’s fingers where he’s holding it.

“V,” Eddie says softly.

There is a very faint feeling that he can sense somewhere in his head, that protectiveness he had barely felt since the baby was here, had not felt at all since Venom started talking again. It’s barely there, almost like Venom is just deliberately trying it out again, but it still makes Eddie want to cry.

_I did not expect to be here for this,_ Venom says. _But we will not be like your human coward father._

“I don’t really want you to go live in a raccoon,” Eddie says.

_That is good._

Eddie sniffs. “Will you—hold me a bit tighter? I don’t care if you hurt my side.”

He does it, coiling tighter, and Eddie sniffs again, rests the back of his head against the cabinet door behind him. He swallows more blood that has pooled in his mouth, and lets the tattered remains of the extension cord drop to the floor.

_We will do better together, Eddie. We will both learn._

“Okay,” Eddie says quietly. “We can do that.”

_Now eat your phone charger._

Eddie nods, wipes his nose with the back of his hand. The baby is still cradled against his chest and Venom is still wrapped around him tight, and he moves over to unplug the charger from the wall.

 

 

 


	15. Chapter 15

**36.**

 

“Well, what does it like to eat these days?” Anne says. The baby is next to her elbow on the kitchen counter, playing with the edge of the necklace she is wearing. Eddie hopes it doesn’t decide to take a bite out of it.

“Razors, mostly,” he says. “Knives, blades, that kind of thing. It ate a cast-iron doorstop yesterday, but then it threw up afterwards, so I think smaller stuff is better for it?”

“Well, we can’t call it _Razor_. That sounds like a middle school skateboarder.” She pats the baby’s back, gently, with her index finger. It has lost interest in the necklace, and is starting to curl around the edge of her half-empty coffee cup. “Although given one of its parents’ names is _Venom_ —”

 _Hey_ , Venom says in Eddie’s head.

“Hey,” Eddie repeats.

“Whatever, Venom. You can die mad,” Anne says, but she’s speaking gently, distracted by stroking the baby’s back. “Little asphalt lump,” she says down to it. “What are we going to call you, huh?”

Eddie doesn’t know, so he just takes a drink of his own coffee. It's getting lighter outside, and the morning traffic on the street is getting noisier: she is going to have to leave for work soon. “I should have thought of something by now.”

“We will figure it out,” she says. “Get away from the edge of that cup, little monster, you absolutely do not need any caffeine in you.”

The baby symbiote clings onto the coffee cup when she lifts it away from it, stretching out a few stubborn black tendrils, but then relents. It coils around her fingers, a couple of tiny teeth poking out close to her skin like it’s thinking about biting her.

“Don’t you have a tantrum now,” she says to it. “Or I really will call you Razor.”

“Here, give it to me,” Eddie says, and Anne reaches out her hand, the little symbiote still hanging off it. He takes it off her, and it coils around Eddie's wrist grumpily, looking like it’s trying to figure out a way to stealthily approach Eddie’s own coffee. "It's just curious," he goes on. "I'll feed it once you're gone and then give it some cutlery to chew on."

"No harm done, " she says, "You know I don't mind the little hellbeast." She drains the last of her coffee, checks the time on her phone. She is going to leave him here alone. Eddie still isn’t used to that, even if it is only for a few hours. 

“I still don’t know what the hell I am doing, Annie,” he says softly as she puts her phone in her bag.

 _Yes we do,_ Venom says in his head _. We must simply continue to nourish our young with plenty of—_

“I am so— _so_ —glad you are back and not being an asshole, V,” Eddie says, “but give us a moment here, okay?”

 _Certainly_.

“Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing, Eddie,” Anne says.

It doesn’t make him feel much better. 

She sighs. “I really gotta go. Dan will be here by eleven. But if you two get some time to talk things through while you're alone, then—you guys have _really_ gotta work on your communication, you understand? And a bunch of other things as well. All right?”

Eddie shrugs. “We had a talk already.”

“You need to do more than have _one talk_.” She straightens up, picks up her bag. “Take care of him, Venom,” she says. “No weird shit. Eddie is still getting better.”

Venom is presumably still giving them a moment, so Eddie just nods. The baby tries to quickly lunge for his coffee cup while he is distracted by her leaving, but Eddie is ready for that and grabs it, lifting it up onto his shoulder. It slumps down near his neck, grazes him with its teeth through the fabric of the t-shirt he is wearing. It feels like someone trying to give him a massage with a bunch of sewing needles.

Anne closes the apartment door behind her, and Eddie exhales and reaches up to pet the baby. It smells like Anne's fancy scented hand soap, and mixed with the baby's own faint burning-metal smell, the effect is a bit like a blacksmith who has sprayed himself with too much cologne on the way to a date and then accidentally set himself on fire.

“We gotta work on our communication, V,” he says as he keeps petting the burning-blacksmith lump-baby. “You hear that?”

He expects an argument, especially since Venom has so much more energy for arguing these days. But he just says: _Okay, Eddie_.

“You sure about that?” he asks, his hand pausing on the baby. He can hear his downstairs neighbor cooking part of her breakfast in the microwave, and someone else talking on their phone as they go down the stairs in the hallway.

 _Anything,_ Venom says.

“Anything?” Eddie holds the baby close against his neck.

_Anything._

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>   
> Thank you for sticking with me for this whole fic, everyone. There may be a sequel some day with some wholesome filth, but who knows when. I appreciate all the encouragement and the lovely comments <3

**Author's Note:**

> I have [a tumblr](http://katjatier.tumblr.com)


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